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THE LEARNING PROCESS 

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Educational Theory Implied in Theory of 

Knowledge 



BY 



V 

Jesse H. Coursault 



Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements 
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 



1907 



t-3 Z-] 5 
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Copyright 1907 

BY 

TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



PREFACE 

Education as a conscious effort towards human evolution 
involves the most difficult problems of life. The school, like 
other institutions, has arisen out of practical needs, at first 
narrowly conceived, and the idea of its aim and methods has 
been of gradual development. The meaning of a thing is its 
relations (p. 44) and naturally the narrow abstract relations 
involved in immediate ends and rule of thumb methods have been 
made prominent in educational theory, and often have been 
perpetuated by tradition long after their usefulness has been 
outgrown in the progressive discovery of remoter needs involving 
wider relations. The true meaning of education and conse- 
quently its aims and methods will be understood only when its- 
fullest and completest relations to the life process have been 
discovered. It is the purpose of this essay to discover in the - 
light of epistemology some of these wider relations and in them 
to find some formal principle or norm that may be of value in 
selecting from a confusion of educational aims and methods 
those which are more in harmony with the evolutionary progress. 

The discussion in the first eight chapters presupposes on the 
part of the reader some familiarity with the theories of knowledge 
concerned. While an attempt has been made to develop the 
essay as an organic whole, some, who may not be especially 
interested in the critical discussion in the first eight chapters,, 
may wish to begin with the constructive theory given in chapter 
nine, while others may wish to read only the educational impli- 
cations discussed in the tenth chapter. The last chapter con- 
tains a brief summary of the whole. 

Acknowledgements should be made both for inspiration and 
guidance to the writer's teachers, including Professors MacVan- 
nel, Dewey, Thorndike and McMurry in Columbia University; 
Professors Hanus, Munsterberg and Royce in Harvard Univer- 
sity; and Professor Gordy in Ohio State University. Especial 
acknowledgement is due Professor MacVannel, under whose 
supervision this dissertation was written, the beneficent influence 
of whose personality and teaching cannot be forgotten. 



4 Preface 

Owing to the nature of the problem, much that is here given 
must be faulty. Life as a self -differentiating unity ever presents 
more and more complex relations, so that thought, which must 
take them into account, can only progressively approximate 
the truth. Indeed, most of one's activities must be guided by 
theory, or opinion, which consists of hypotheses in process of 
becoming facts, and ever subject to modification. It is hoped 
that what is here given will be suggestive to the reader, and the 
correction of error, where he can discover it, is left to him. The 
solution of the educational problem will have to be done over 
many times, each time more closely approximating the truth 
and becoming a more definite guide in the most difficult of all 
activities, the progressive realization of human nature. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 7 

Chapter I. 
The Theories of Socrates and Plato 1 1 

Chapter II. 
The Theory of Aristotle 17 

Chapter III. 
The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 22 

Chapter IV. 
The Theory of Descartes 24 

Chapter V. 
The Theory of Locke 27 

Chapter VI. 
The Theory of Leibniz , 30 

Chapter VII. 
The Theory of Kant 32 

Chapter VIII. 
The Theory of Descriptive Science 35 

Chapter IX. 
Modern Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 40 

Chapter X. 
Educational Implications . . . , Si 

Chapter XI. 
Summary 94 

* * * 
Bibliography 98 



INTRODUCTION 



In the growth of the tree of knowledge new branches spring 
from the old. Educational theory, while it develops in a direc- 
tion distinctively its own, has its basis in other more fundamental 
branches of thought. That the theory of knowledge and educa- 
tional theory are most intimately connected is at once evident. 
Both are nourished by the problems arising in the study of the 
knowing process ; the one for the purpose of giving some criterion 
of the validity of the product, or knowledge, the other to reveal 
a method whereby the process may be controlled in reproducing 
knowledge. Especially in the early stages of a new development 
must that which is vital in the older stock be adapted to strength- 
en the one which is budding. Accordingly, it is the purpose of 
this essay to consider certain typical theories of knowledge with 
the hope that some truths may be revealed which will tend to 
strengthen that movement of thought which is rapidly making 
the work of the teacher a rationalized endeavor rather than a 
mere routine. 

A theory of knowledge is itself a product of the knowing proc- 
ess and therefore subject to the limitations of thought. Accord- 
ingly, it is not immediately given but must involve presupposi- 
tions, without which nothing can be known. The consciousness 
of immediacy arises through a differentiation of experience into 
subjective and objective phases, which can be separated only as 
logical abstractions, and, in this differentiation, the objective 
phase to a degree loses its immediacy and receives meaning 
only in the light of presuppositions. Therefore, to limit oneself 
to immediacy is to join the Eastern mystic in abandoning 
knowledge and seeking annihilation. Schools of philosophy 
then must begin with unproved assumptions; and, according as 
these assumptions differ, there result types of theory which vary 
in important particulars. In order to judge the relative value of 
various theories, the assumptions on which they are based must 
be considered. The cause of difference in assumptions is due 
to abstraction, or viewing one phase of experience out of relation 
to the others. This is done when one phase is regarded to be 



8 Introduction 

independently real, as in subjective idealism, materialism or 
pluralism; or when one phase is used to interpret another in 
aspects in which the two are not analogous, as when mental 
phenomena are interpreted in the light of space concepts. To 
comprehend the truth free from all abstraction, to see everything 
in its relations, is the ultimate goal of knowledge, a goal infinitely 
removed but gradually being approximated. Often conclusions 
derived from narrow abstractions are useful for certain limited 
practical purposes and therefore justifiable, as in the case of 
the special sciences; but, when in relation to some wider purpose 
conclusions conflict, those which involve the less abstraction are 
nearer to the truth. The Ptolemaic astronomy is useful for many 
ordinary purposes of life; but, for the wider purposes of the 
astronomer, it must give way to the teachings of Copernicus, 
which explain it and at the same time give a more comprehensive 
and valuable account of the facts. The common dualistic view 
of the world is a satisfactory hypothesis to guide many ordinary 
activities, but its inadequacy to guide the more comprehensive 
activities of teaching is no less than that of the old astronomy 
to predict stellar phenomena. Accordingly, the method to be 
attempted in this essay in considering typical theories of knowl- 
edge is to trace apparent inconsistencies and conflicts to the 
partial points of view from which theories have been made, and, 
in doing so, to present a more comprehensive point of view which 
will explain the narrower ones and at the same time make 
possible a theory of knowledge which will offer truths of vital 
importance to the theory of education. 

The immediate practical value of the result hoped for should 
not be misunderstood. The mere knowledge of educational 
theory will not make a good teacher for the same reason that the 
mere knowledge of logic will not make a good dialectician; or 
of ethics, a just man. Because the concrete situations to which 
they apply, although having some common aspects, are in essen- 
tial particulars infinitely variable and involve appreciation of 
worth more than description of fact, normative disciplines con- 
sist of generalizations which are regulative rather than creative 
and should furnish in a concrete situation a general basis for the 
selection of the best of several courses of action; but, although 
suggestive, they do not, like the descriptive sciences, independ- 



Introduction 9 

ently tell precisely what must be done in order to realize the 
desired end (cf. pp. 53-54). While practice without theory is. 
blind, theory without practice is empty. 

At best a theory of education is only a general idea, a hypo- 
thetical plan of action, which has been abstracted from a long 
process of experience and which must be further tested, corrected 
and elaborated through its application to the actual process of 
teaching. Thus may education repay its debt to the theory of 
knowledge by testing epistemological principles in the court of 
action, the final court of appeal in the determination of truth. 






CHAPTER I 

The Theories of Socrates and Plato 

Thought arises from conflict, from unstable adjustment. 
(cf. pp. 4 2_ 43.) In earliest times the conditions that make 
thought self-centered did not exist. It was turned outward in 
an attempt to find unity in the unstable manifoldness of nature, 
and the first attempts of philosophy were to reduce all to one 
element, whether it be air, fire or water. 

As a tribe developed, the most satisfactory forms of activity 
which it had experienced were preserved by gradual and imper- 
ceptible natural selection and embodied in tradition. This 
tradition was followed naively and without question, and thus, 
in each tribe, so complete a connection between the self and 
nature existed that the difference between them was unnoticed. 
Naturally the experiences and consequently the traditions of 
various tribes differed. When, however, through war and 
commerce tribes met, conflicting traditions tended to become 
mutually destructive; and, with the destruction of habitual 
paths of self-expression, a hiatus yawned between the self and 
the world; and, in the consequent mal-adjustment, the idea 
of subject was born into consciousness. From now on, phil- 
osophy had two terms with which to deal, nature and self, the 
world and the individual, the subject and the object, and, from 
the early problem of harmonizing the unstable manifoldness of 
nature, it was brought face to face with the infinitely more com- 
plex one of harmonizing the self and nature. Thus arose the 
conditions of the problem of knowledge. 

With faith in outward authority weakened and nothing ap- 
parent to take its place, an age of skepticism naturally followed. 
Traditional uniformity gave way to individual caprice. The 
individual man was held to be the measure of all things; his 
belief was for him the standard of truth; his pleasure, the stand- 
ard of right; and, in the consequent self-seeking, justice was the 
interest of the stronger. Skepticism may be the pre-condition 
of a better founded faith, but it is not itself creative. Therefore 



12 The Learning Process 

the skeptics, to whom the name Sophists is generally applied r r 
formulated no positive general theory of knowledge. The 
method of their educational practice was guided by a narrow 
empiricism, and, consistent with a belief in the homo-mensura 
tenet, they were concerned with opinion rather than knowledge ,. 
and consequently emphasized rhetorical persuasion rather than 
logical conviction. A world of individuals whose opinions, 
regarded as truth, could be externally determined would imply 
a somewhat mechanical theory of knowledge. 

The authority of the world without had been denied for 
definite reasons; but that of the world within, only through 
ignorance of it. Therefore, when positive philosophy again 
arose, its attention was naturally centered on the latter. " Know 
thyself" was the maxim. With a philosophic faith in some 
ultimate reconciliation in a world of apparent conflicting indi- 
vidualism, Socrates began the investigation of the ideas of those 
about him; and, by a process of definition stimulated and 
refined through argument, he attempted to discover the common 
essence of concepts. The problem was too great for one man 
and he confessed his inability to solve it. While in Socrates 
the theory of knowledge began to germinate, modern students r 
whose minds have developed in a social medium enriched by 
more than two thousand years of philosophic thought, are prone 
to read into the Socratic position more than was ever distinctly 
differentiated in the mind of the great teacher. 

An adequate theory of knowledge must give some reasonable 
account of the development of concepts. But Socrates did not 
do this. While the so-called Socratic method, that of question- 
ing, conforms to the method of creating tensions (discussed in 
chapter nine), Socrates does not seem to have appreciated its 
vital significance in the development of knowledge. He was 
interested in the meanings of ideas as products, rather than in 
the formal process out of which they develop, and, assuming 
the existence of concepts in the mind and their essential uniform- 
ity, in positive doctrine he advanced no farther than his so-called 
intellectual "midwifery". To bring already formed ideas to 
light was his mission as he conceived it. As they could be 
brought to light only in intellectual form, he failed to recognize 

i Some Sophists may have advanced from the position of skepticism. Cf. Gomperz, Greek 
Thinkers, Vol. I, pp. 451 ff. (Auth. Edition, London, 190 1); also, Grote, Plato and the 
other Companions of Sokrates. 



The Theories of Socrates and Plato 13 

their underlying volitional and emotional nature. This is most 
noticeable in his ethical doctrine that one who knows the right 
will do it. The theory of knowledge here, at its very beginning, 
received an intellectualistic turn which has in a large measure 
affected its further development. The results of this are notice- 
able in education even at the present time. 

The Sophistic and Socratic types of thought were the heritage 
of Plato and the solution of the problem which arose from 
practical needs became from now on the special work of the 
philosopher. 

Socrates had directed attention to the mind as the source of 
true and authoritative concepts. For further investigation two 
problems naturally arose: (1) to discover the basis of the truth 
or validity of concepts, (2) to systematize them according to 
their meaning. Plato attempted to solve both. 

The universe of experience is infinitely manifold and the 
phases of it to which one human mind is strongly attracted are 
limited; consequently, individual thinkers tend either to be 
satisfied with the account of a part, neglecting the rest; or else 
to interpret all in the light of a few phases of it. To understand 
a philosopher and his relation to thought as a wider social 
product, one must know his point of view. Plato had a natural 
interest in mathematics and ethics ; and thought previous to him 
had made prominent two views of the nature of reality: the 
Eleatics believed it to be static and permanent; the school of 
Heraclitus viewed it as a ceaseless becoming. The influence of 
these four phases of thought upon Plato is evident, (a) His 
interest in mathematics influenced him to look upon ideas as 
independent of the concrete manifestations of nature. Math- 
ematics deals with the forms, space and time, abstracted from 
the content of experience. Since the forms are universal, after 
the abstraction has once been made and mathematics has begun 
its work of analysis, no further attention to nature is necessary; 
the mental vision — the eye of the soul or sixth sense as Plato 
calls it — sees the relations within the abstraction. With an 
inclination naturally to use this class of ideas in which he was 
so strongly interested as typical of all ideas, it was easy for him 
to follow Socrates in placing entire emphasis upon the concept 
as the fundamental basis of knowledge, although in reality a 



14 The Learning Process 

concept is an abstraction which marks an advanced stage in 
the knowing process, (b) Again, because of the universality of 
space and time, concepts based upon these abstract forms have 
a peculiar permanence and finality. Accordingly, the natural 
trend of Plato's mathematical bias led him to the Eleatic position 
in his doctrine of ideas, (c) Then too since these concepts are 
independent of any particular mind at any particular moment, 
it is easy to imagine them to be independent of all mind. With 
poetic imagery the permanent and static ideas were hypostasized 
and viewed as reals of which the changing phases of experience 
were mere copies. Seeing in the latter the Heracleitean principle 
of change, he turned to the realm of ideas as more worthy of 
study ; for a world in flux did not offer the promise of that definite 
universal truth which Socrates sought. The universal and 
particular, which can be separated only through abstraction, 
Plato here practically sundered, although the statement that 
particulars are copies of universals seems vaguely to refer to 
some relationship. As a matter of fact, universal and particular 
are two aspects of a unitary reality and neither can exist nor have 
any meaning absolutely sundered from the other. "Perception 
without conception is blind, conception without perception is 
empty." Thus in two ways did he become the victim of his 
mental bent; he viewed all ideas in the light of mathematical 
concepts and neglected one phase of reality to center his attention 
on another. 

While the practical need which gave rise to Plato's philosophy 
was primarily a moral one, the purely intellectualistic position 
which he had inherited from Socrates had no place for genuine 
ethics. Using the concept "good" in a fancied analogy, which 
destroyed its ethical sense, he made it serve to relate ideas and 
phenomena. Things in the phenomenal world of change were 
"good" to the extent that they gave adequate expression to 
the reality embodied in the world of ideas. Again, complete 
thinking involves both abstraction and synthesis or conscious 
restoration of the abstraction to the unity from which it was 
taken. Plato, following the tangent of abstraction, attributed 
deepest reality to the most empty abstractions, arranged his 
"ideas" in a system with "the good" as supreme, and then 
considered the highest aim of life to be the passive contempla- 



The Theories of Socrates and Plato 15 

tion of this. Here, indeed, is the irony of a philosophy that 
takes a partial point of view. When activity inquired for a 
guide, it was made passive: the search begun for the sake of 
goodness ended by making it either an empty abstraction or a 
mere link of relation to a realm considered too unreal for serious 
study. 

Plato was an artist; consequently, it was natural for him to be 
synthetic rather than analytic in the sense of treating ideas only 
as they are involved in wider relations rather than probing into 
the processes out of which they develop. The same tendency 
that inclined him to order them in a system according to their 
meaning, influenced him to account for their origin and develop- 
ment by the somewhat poetic doctrine of reminiscence. This 
doctrine is based only upon an analogy with implications favor- 
able to poetic interpretation. Ultimately any analysis must 
face the same limit of facts which Plato sought to transcend in 
the myth. The human mind cannot primarily create: it is 
limited in its investigations to the description of experience, 
which cannot be transcended. In this description, however, 
it can to a greater or less extent trace the process in which 
knowledge develops. And in this very description is the promise 
of an answer to the problems of both epistemology and educa- 
tion. 

Even with analytic insight, only a very partial answer could 
have been given by Plato, because his attention was limited to 
abstract phases of the knowing process. Therefore, he was soon 
compelled to take recourse to the myth. In fact, in this matter, 
he made no advance upon the Socratic doctrine of "midwifery". 
Ideas were born with difficulty, with the assistance of dialectic. 
Other than this he told nothing of the process through which 
they got their highly organized blood and sinew and the breath 
that made them vital. The limited view to which he gave atten- 
tion — and this was the view of Socrates also — was intellect ab- 
stracted from feeling and will. In dialectic, the emotional ap- 
preciation of worth and the exercise of will are involved; and, if 
Socrates and Plato had analyzed this very process, they would 
lave found a cue to the method of knowledge, but they were inter- 
sted in knowledge as a product, and so failed to discover that 
heir very practice of philosophy reveals the inadequacy of their 



1 6 The Learning Process 

intellectualistic position. Indeed, the activity of the philosopher 
to find amid conflicting traditions the right form of self-expres- 
sion, itself became a form of self-expression, and, when fixed by 
habit, was felt under tension to be the worthful thing to do. 1 
Activity, which when consciously directed becomes the expres- 
sion of will, is fundamental in life, and out of this activity in 
the service of further activity does knowledge develop. The 
intellectualist makes contemplation the highest good because his 
view -point has excluded everything else, but even in contempla- 
tion has he unconsciously slipped in feeling and will: the highest 
goal even here is inconceivable apart from activity. Neither 
the epistemological problem of the validity of knowledge nor 
the educational problem of the control of knowledge can be 
solved from the intellectualistic position, for the validity of an 
idea can be determined only by reference to something else and 
control takes place only in the direction of a process where 
certain causes condition certain results. The final answer to 
these problems from the intellectualistic position, as is clearly 
evident in later writings, must assume an illogical dualism where 
validity is made a correspondence between an idea and some- 
thing else independent of it, and therefore without the pale of 
consciousness and unknowable ; and the method of education by 
mechanical analogies descriptive of how that which is out of 
the pale of consciousness builds up in the mind ideas which 
correspond to it, bridging an imaginary chasm the existence of 
which could never be known. Even this theory would be im- 
possible without reference to will, for the very mechanical 
analogies involving force are themselves analogies derived from 
the ejection of the subjective experience of will into objective 
phenomena as a means of interpreting them (pp. 47 and 53). 
Intellectualism views only a product as static, and, after shatter- 
ing the crystal of knowledge into fragments, it is powerless to 
get them together again: a test of validity and a method of con- 
trol demand uniting relations, and relations are fundamentally 
dynamic, existing in a process. 

1 Cf . p. 44. — To use a psychological analogy, as the world of "external" vibration is 
revealed in color, sound and other qualitative sensations, so the tensions in our habits are 
revealed in feelings of worth. 



CHAPTER II 

The Theory of Aristotle 

With Plato's problem, Aristotle inherited his master's point 
of view. But Aristotle's interest was biological rather than 
ethico-teleological and mathematical. This naturally led him 
to a more comprehensive view -point. The demands of biology 
could not be satisfied with only a formal, static realm of ideas 
as a working basis, while nature with its rich variety of content 
was neglected; and, as soon as nature was taken into serious 
account, a unitary dynamic conception of reality was the result. 
It was dynamic because nature involves change and growth: 
it was unitary because both matter and mind are involved in 
the life process. In Aristotle's thinking, the narrower view- 
point which he inherited was never brought into complete 
harmonious relation to the wider one to which his interest led 
him; and, consequently, the effect of two conflicting principles 
is very evident in his philosophy. The one principle made 
him at times an unconscious victim of the Platonic dualism and 
reached its culmination in his theology, where God is represented 
to be pure, immovable form, and in his ethics, where contempla- 
tion is regarded to be the crowning aim of life: the other made 
an evolutionary interpretation everywhere prominent. Aris- 
totle's statements which have direct bearing upon the theory 
of knowledge are fragmentary, and the fact that he was influenced 
by two conflicting principles makes their interpretation difficult ; 
for inferences drawn in the light of one principle differ from 
those made in the light of the other. However, his real con- 
tribution to thought is included in his conception of reality as a 
unitary process; and, to appreciate in its purity the advance 
which he made upon Plato, it is necessar}^ to eliminate the 
effects of an occasional unconscious influence of the static- 
dualistic position, against which he openly contended in so 
masterly a manner. 

The biological point of view reveals an organic unitary process 
of development. This process from the lowest to the highest 



18 The Learning Process 

manifestations of life presents two fundamental aspects, which 
Aristotle called "dunamis" and "energeia". The "dunamis" 
is the basis out of which the life principle rises to a completer 
realization. The "energeia" is the realizing viewed in its rela- 
tion to the "dunamis". As the life principle advances in its 
realization, the "energeia" for the lower stage becomes the 
"dunamis" for the higher. A possible translation for these 
terms is situation and agent, at least when applied to higher 
forms of life. In the life of man, the process is a conscious one. 
Based upon a present situation (dunamis), a purpose is formed 
with a view to a better situation : through the activity (energeia) 
to realize the purpose, new experience is gained: this experience 
in turn integrates with the old as a situation (dunamis) for new pur- 
poses and activities (energeia). Thus does experience ever widen, 
making possible an increasing number of purposes, while the 
greater number of purposes lead to activities which bring about 
a further increase in experience. A little child, comparatively 
speaking, is merely a "dunamis", a possibility, a situation, out 
of which through self-activity a gradual development comes. 
In this process of self-realization, as each individual progresses 
in experience, he builds throughout his life the world in which 
he consciously lives. 

Of this conscious life process there are two fundamental 
phases. The essence of purpose is its view to a better situation: 
this involves an appreciation of relative worth, an evaluation. 
The purpose can be realized through activity only in so far as 
experience is under control. Plato, with his ethical bent, was 
interested in evaluation; while Aristotle advanced to the investi- 
gation of the complementary phase of the process and sought a 
method of control. Accordingly, while Plato's philosophy cul- 
minated in the classification according to worth of ethical concepts, 
Aristotle developed a system of logic. Control must be exercised 
in a world of changing particulars and its task can be accom- 
plished only in so far as this world of particulars is amenable to 
thought, is rational. The relation of thought to its object at 
once became a question of fundamental importance and here 
Aristotle took issue with the Platonic dualism. In developing 
the syllogism, he pointed out the unitary logical process, which 
involves both the particular and the general, a process by 



The Theory of Aristotle 19 

which advancing control is gained over experience, whether it 
be through the unconscious forming and use of simpler concepts, 
the uncritical reasoning of every-day life or the application of 
the more refined methods of exact science. In analyzing this 
process, he gave attention chiefly to the deductive phase, tracing 
premises back to the categories and showing how the individual 
is subsumed under the general. Turning from Plato's doctrine 
of reminiscence, he held that, by a process the potentiality of 
which is innate, these premises, or principia, develop out of 
particular judgments of sense, remembered, compared, and 
through resemblances unified; but he did not further analyze 
the method of induction, a problem which was left unsolved 
until the Baconian movement. 

That to Aristotle the knowing process was regarded as unitary 
is evident not only as a logical conclusion from his presupposi- 
tions, but also because in his analysis he has revealed both sub- 
jective and objective phases throughout it. He held that there 
can be interaction only where there is something in common 
and this precludes dualism: for two "things" are the same in 
respect to what they have in common; and, however they may 
differ in other respects, these differences must be organic with 
the common element, else a repeated dualism would break out 
in both and destroy them. The world cannot be abstracted 
without including, in a measure, reason: reason cannot be 
abstracted without, in a measure, including the world. It is 
true that Aristotle points now to sense and now to intellect as 
the origin of knowledge, but either the greatest of logicians must 
be accused of the most apparent inconsistency or his statements 
must be interpreted to give only greater relative emphasis to 
one phase or the other. There is little probability that the 
Platonic position influenced him in the analysis of ordinary 
everyday experience, for the very purpose in making the analysis 
was to bridge the chasm which his master had made between 
ideas and the phenomenal world; in a word, to show that the 
universal exists in the thing. The common element in subject 
and object, that which unifies them is, according to Aristotle, 
the form, the universal. In the process of knowledge in appre- 
hending the forms of things, reason finds itself in the world. 
Reason is potentially in the world; the world is potentially in 



20 The Learning Process 

reason. In the realization of its potentiality, reason presents 
two aspects which Aristotle calls creative and passive, and which, 
in mental evolution, seem to correspond to the "dunamis" and 
"energeia" of the wider process of development of which reason 
and the world are but phases. 

The problems implied in Aristotle's newly discovered concep- 
tion of unitary development are infinite both in number and 
complexity. In consequence, he suffered the limitations of a 
pioneer: it was impossible for one man or one age to cover the 
whole field. However much social considerations affected his 
solution of other problems, in the theory of knowledge it has 
remained for later generations to account for the logical norms 
or habits as a social product and to show that reason finds 
itself in the world because in social progress it has been vicari- 
ously put there; for each generation has helped to build the 
world in which future generations are to live. The world is 
rational because the world is built out of judgments. Aside 
from the sense symbol, a thing (e. g. a chair) which one seems to 
see directly is a product of judgments formed in previous ex- 
perience and ejected into the symbol; indeed, even the symbol 
itself is not differentiated independently of the judgment. 
Thus every new judgment, naive or critical, to which one be- 
comes habituated is built into his world: the proved theories of 
one generation become mental habits and consequently parts of 
the world of the next. Thus every hypothesis proved by science 
is a step in the creation of things. With a knowledge of physical 
and chemical theory, for instance, one puts into the world and 
then seems to see immediately that which another, ignorant of 
these sciences, cannot see. The idea is not only in the thing: it 
is the thing. Logical norms are the essential forms of this 
creative process having become conscious of themselves, their 
development and habituation being a social product in accord- 
ance with the principles under which any advanced experience 
is socially developed. 

The Platonic conception of reality influenced him especially 
when, in an attempt to transcend human experience, he ima- 
gined the process as a completed whole. The line of progress, 
as completed, naturally appeared to be static and presented 
terminal aspects easily amenable to abstraction. Thus, at one 



The Theory of Aristotle 21 

terminal, there appeared to be pure matter without form; and, 
at the other, pure form without matter. In relation to thought, 
the most prominent aspect of which is formal, matter seemed to 
have a recalcitrant element; while, as pure form, God appeared 
to be static. These speculations, at first transcending human 
experience, in turn exerted an influence within it. Thus Aris- 
totle's conception of God had a tendency to make his theory of 
knowledge intellectualistic rather than voluntaristic ; for it intro- 
duced an inconsistent static principle into his ethics, where 
undue emphasis was given to the ethical value of contemplation : 
his conception of pure matter constantly threatened his doc- 
trine of knowledge with an inconsistent dualism; for abstracted 
matter seemed to be irrational and liable to chance. 

When reality is viewed as an evolutionary process, as a self- 
differentiating unity, all progress in the understanding of it 
must be made by separating the various phases through abstrac- 
tion and then viewing them together in their unitary relation — 
in other words, in analysis and synthesis. Dualism is the 
result of incomplete thinking. Within a unitary experience a 
separation has been made. Thought has done its perfect work 
only when the abstracted phases have been consciously restored 
to the unitary experience; when, in a word, their essential re- 
lationship has been discovered. Plato had separated ideas on 
the one hand and the phenomena of nature on the other. Aris- 
totle advanced towards the completion of his master's thought 
by forming a synthesis of these abstractions through a more or 
less definite discovery of the relation between idea and concrete 
object, concept and percept, universal and particular. The 
knowledge of this relation becomes more definite only as reason 
advances in its infinite work of making ever more refined dif- 
ferentiations and integrations. Thus did Aristotle, by discover- 
ing a wider point of view in relation to which the narrower ones 
could be unified, give to thought a vantage ground in the solu- 
tion of its problems. This wider view -point makes it possible 
to unify the valuable contributions which individual thinkers 
have added to the social stream of thought; and, in consequence, 
it furnishes a norm by which these contributions may be judged. 



CHAPTER III 

The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 

After Aristotle there was no important advance in the theory 
of knowledge for two thousand years. A current of religious 
and mystical thought from the East intermingled with Greek 
philosophy and gave to it a theological turn, which, however 
valuable it may have been for the world in other ways, did not 
present the problem of knowledge in a form to advance to any 
great extent its solution. In the early centuries of the Christian 
era, the religious phase of thought began to dominate to such 
an extent that the Roman Catholic Church developed as the 
institution for its expression. The dogmas of the church were 
presented as the truth. This was necessary, for the conquering 
hordes which swept over Europe were not prepared to under- 
stand the advanced conceptions of an older civilization. Thought 
must stop its absolute advance until the new civilization caught 
up with it. But when the new civilization had lived through the 
types of experience conserved for it in the church and was ready 
to advance, the institution which had found its justification in 
the conservation of thought, now tended to suppress the thinker. 
Thought lives in the solving of its problems, the comprehension 
of its doubts. The traditional relation of church and indi- 
vidual, no longer justifiable, was not easily dissolved; and, 
when the church gave dogmatic solutions for problems and an 
implicit faith in its infallibility dispelled doubts, there was no 
occasion for thinking. 

But this situation could not long endure. Nature's creed is 
not "Believe or be condemned", but "Act rightly or be con- 
demned", and to determine how to act requires thinking. Now 
that the new civilization had overtaken the old, problems within 
the teaching of the church inevitably arose. To strengthen the 
dogma, belief made an alliance with reason, an act which sealed 
the doom of an institution that, as a dogmatic teacher, had, so 
far as the thinking world is concerned, fulfilled its mission. 
The old problem of the relation of the universal to the particular 



The Theory of Mediaeval Writers 23 

now took the forms of realism and nominalism. Since the 
church claimed to be a reality greater than individuals and the 
doctrines of the Trinity and original sin involved a similar 
conception, an appeal was made to Plato's thesis that the real 
is the universal. The Platonic conception universalia ante rem 
prevailed in the twelfth century and was taken up into the 
Aristotelian universalia in re in the thirteenth : but the pendulum 
did not stop here, and, in the following two centuries, the par- 
ticular was viewed as the only real for knowledge, for uni- 
versalia post rem and nominalism prevailed. Since the objects 
of faith were universal, nominalism divorced faith and knowl- 
edge. Further development must then come from reason 
independent of faith — a fact which destroyed the basis of schol- 
asticism. As a last resort the church made an appeal to force, 
the final evidence that its authoritative mission as infallible 
dispenser of truth was at an end. Man is greater than insti- 
tutions. 

An external influence also came to hasten its dissolution. 
Greek philosophy preserved in the East and free from the Pro- 
crustean bed of religious dogma was introduced into the western 
world through the Crusades and the flight of scholars at the 
fall of Constantinople, while the newly invented printing press 
made its wide dissemination possible. Then, too, a new astron- 
omy and a new continent stimulated interest in nature. The 
story of the Grecian movement of thought was now repeated in 
that conflicting traditions became mutually destructive, an 
age of skepticism arose and an appeal was made to reason as 
arbiter. 

At this point, Descartes began the problem. The phases of 
rationalism and empiricism were differentiated in Leibniz and 
Locke, integrated in the Kantian movement, given a functional 
turn under the influence of modern biological conceptions and 
are being socially interpreted by thinkers of the present. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Theory of Descartes 

An age of conflicting tradition naturally leads to an age of 
skepticism. When skepticism has removed the authority of the 
outer world, thought must seek a new foundation in the inner. 
The world had completed a cycle of thought from Socrates to 
Descartes; and, generally speaking, similar conditions led both 
to begin anew with a rationalistic philosophy. But no thinker 
is independent of his past. He is educated in a social medium 
which is a product of the past and unconsciously grows into 
habits of thought, ways of looking at things, from which he 
cannot escape because they constitute his very mental equip- 
ment. So, when Descartes attempted to ignore the past and 
begin philosophy anew, he was still limited by traditional con- 
ceptions. Both his problem and its solution were in a great 
measure influenced by the beliefs of the church of the Middle 
Ages, which through force of tradition formed a vital part of 
his environment. In religious teaching, the distinction between 
soul and body, the mind and nature, had been sharply drawn: 
the soul was immortal, the body perishable; the spirit was 
divine, the world evil. Descartes began with the dualistic 
conception of reality in a most acute form: mind and matter 
in themselves were defined as two substances so essentially 
different as logically to preclude any anahyzable common basis 
upon which an interaction could be explained. His rationalistic 
view-point led him to begin with mind. His problem was to 
find a means through which matter also could be comprehended. 

With a strong mathematical interest, Descartes assumed as 
a criterion of truth the certainty which attaches to mathematical 
axioms. This certainty he claimed to find in the judgment, 
"I think, therefore I exist", which forms the starting point of 
his argument. But even here an assumption has crept in, for 
the two pronouns are not the same in meaning, the one being 
the real and the other the logical subject, or the real subject 
objectified. Mathematics deals with relations in the objective 



The Theory of Descartes 25 

phase of experience : Descartes' proposition transforms the 
subjective into the objective. Thought proceeds by a process 
of hypothesis and proof. The teaching of the church now sup- 
plied him with the hypothesis that God mediates between 
mind and matter. This inference is valueless so far as positive 
knowledge is concerned, for the finite mind cannot understand 
how God performs such mediation and it is the understanding of 
the method, the "how," that increases control of experience. 
While mankind cannot understand the ultimate constitution 
of the universe, yet many problems can be solved in ways which 
do increase such control. To refer the difficulties of a problem 
to a Supreme Being is to preclude other hypotheses practically 
valuable which may be capable of demonstration. Had Des- 
cartes not been satisfied with his hypothesis, it would have 
been a mental necessity for him to have investigated the assump- 
tions which led to the problem and this investigation might 
have brought him nearer to the truth. But he believed that 
his solution could be demonstrated. Here again he was under 
religious influence ; for when inference involves the close personal 
relation of religious conviction, one may be blind to flaws in the 
proof. Assuming that there are innate ideas existing in a way 
independently of an external reality to which they refer, he 
attempted to complicate these ideas so as to prove the existence 
of the external reality. In one argument, he assumed that the 
idea of causation involves the independent existence of such a 
law and also that there is a positive innate idea of a Perfect 
Being: from these assumptions it follows that there must be a 
being as great as the idea to have caused it. In the other 
argument, he asserted that the idea of a Perfect Being requires 
His existence, because existence is one of the qualities of perfec- 
tion. A Perfect Being would not deceive : therefore, the material 
world corresponds to man's idea of it, providing he accepts only 
that which is clear and distinct : otherwise he himself is responsi- 
ble for error. 

The fundamental fallacy of Descartes' thinking is the assump- 
tion that by complicating universal ideas he can reach the 
particular of experience. The cycle of universal ideas can never 
lead beyond itself, for it is essentially an abstract view of experi- 
ence which neglects the particular. But a deeper fallacy lies in 



26 The Learning Process 

the very statement of his problem. There is no realm of ideas, 
there is no mind, wholly apart from the world of extension, and 
there is no world of extension wholly apart from mind, so far as 
human beings are concerned. To say "I think" without saying 
"I think something" is meaningless. Both the mind and the 
realm of ideas of which Descartes speaks are empty abstractions 
and his problem has no significance. As did Socrates and 
Plato, he took a partial point of view, but dealt with abstrac- 
tions that had been more sharply defined by centuries of acute 
thinking. He has abstracted the mature individual from 
society and the intellect from the other phases of the individual 
mind. There can be no rational theory of knowledge consistent 
with his doctrine. Thought lives upon its own problems and the 
chief value of Descartes' philosophy is that it gave to subsequent 
thinking the basis for a most vigorous life. 



CHAPTER V 
The Theory of Locke 

Now that Descartes had so clearly sundered the self and the 
world, it was possible to look upon either the external world or 
mind as the primary basis of knowledge. Of these opposing 
views, the philosophies of Locke and Leibniz may be regarded as 
typical. A simple way to deal with the problem was to assume 
the dualism which Descartes had made, disregard its metaphys- 
ical difficulties, and, in an empirical way, trace the process of know- 
ing. This was the task undertaken by Locke. With the world 
to be known and the knower considered to be separate realities, 
the problem was to discover how the knowledge of the world 
gets into the mind. Locke, accordingly, regarded the mind to 
be a blank tablet and held that nothing can be in the intellect 
which did not come through the senses. According to this view, 
the external world affects the mind through the senses and the 
mind thus affected becomes aware not only of the world but 
also of its own states, all knowledge thus arising from sensation 
and reflection. The external world, however, is not in this way 
directly presented as it actually exists, for essentially it is 
extension and motion, which sensation presents to the mind in 
an enriched form. As Helmholz says: "We should be grateful 
to our senses for conjuring up colors and sounds out of vibrations, 
and for bringing us in sensations, as in a symbolic language, news 
of the external world". Knowledge, then, begins with simple 
ideas which come through a single sense, as sounds and colors; 
through the combined product of two or more senses, as ideas 
of extension and motion; through reflection, as those of feeling 
and will; and through reflection and sensation together, as 
those of succession and power. Out of this material, complex 
ideas are formed referring to temporal, spacial and mental 
modifications or modes, to substance and relations. 

Locke's point of view is that of naive realism. Like the view- 
point of the Ptolemaic astronomy, it is fixed by habit upon 
people in general and is apparently a practical working basis for 



28 The Learning Process 

every-day purposes. Unfortunately, it is more firmly fixed 
than the old astronomy, because there is no uniform teaching of 
thoughtful men to oppose it. Therefore it is regarded as the 
view of common sense. But the theory does not adequately 
explain the facts. A true explanation of a process may be 
refined without limit, but a false one is soon blocked; for, when 
a process is properly viewed, ever finer differentiations may be 
directly seen within experience, but when it is falsely viewed, 
that which is not seen must be built up constructively out of 
inadequate material, judged to be analogous and got elsewhere 
in experience. In three most fundamental parts of his doctrine, 
Locke has no experience, either direct or constructed, to support 
him. Further analysis is hopeless because the illusion fails so 
completely that there is nothing to analyze. First, if the world 
is completely sundered from the mind, how does it ever become 
known? Locke refers this difficulty to the wisdom of a Divine 
Being. Second, how do a multiplicity of sensations received 
from without become related and organized into the intelligible 
world which the mind does know? With naive inconsistency he 
assumes mental self-activity to account for this, but self -activity 
is an empty abstraction which explains nothing. Third, how 
does a material world acting upon a tabula rasa ever give rise to 
those known subjective phases of mind — emotions and attitudes 
— which may be included in the word personality? Locke does 
not seem to appreciate the real significance of this problem. 
Locke is right when he says that all knowledge arises out of ex- 
perience, but wrong in his theory of the nature of that exper- 
ience ; and these difficulties arise from the fact that he deals with 
two abstractions from a wider process of experience as though 
they were independent realities. One is a highly differentiated 
abstract phase of human experience — i. e. the material world — 
which he imagines to act upon a meaningless abstraction — i. e. 
an empty mind — through the medium of the senses. Indeed, 
he deserts experience at the outset. An independent material 
world of which ideas are copies is an unnecessary assumption 
wholly impossible to prove, for all the mind knows is its ideas. 
Furthermore the known world is not composed of things known 
separately and then unified. They could never have been 
known as separate objects if they had not first been known in 



The Theory of Locke 29 

■unity, for the meaning of a thing grows out of its relations: a 
thing is indeed a focus point for a number of relations. The 
association of ideas in thinking, which is too often viewed as 
mechanical, is possible just because the meaning of one thing 
does include the meaning of another. A conscious unitary 
relationship is the precondition of all thinking and through 
thought is the world of things built up. Locke can appear to 
derive relations from things, the general from the particular, 
because in thought the particular has been developed out of 
the general and means it plus certain differentiations. Accord- 
ingly, what he assumed to be the primary elements of knowledge 
appear to be in fact its final product: he has made an attempt 
to work the problem of knowledge backwards. Again, an 
empty mind is nothing, but Locke imagines it to be a sort of 
magic receptacle in which can be found, when needed, modes of 
feeling and will and relations, which his basal assumptions fail to 
provide. It would be absurd to attempt to explain an oak tree 
on the basis of a soil, of leaves and of the empty space which the 
tree is to fill and refer the difficulties of the problem to the 
wisdom of God and the self -activity of the tree: it is equally 
absurd to attempt to explain knowledge from the Lockean 
basal assumptions. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Theory of Leibniz 

The nature of relations, which Locke seemed so little to appre- 
ciate and the neglect of which resulted in fundamental incon- 
sistencies in his doctrine, had a determining influence upon the 
theory of Leibniz. The substances of Descartes, one of which 
Locke assumed to be the primary basis of knowledge, were quan- 
titative abstractions — thought and extension. Leibniz, with his 
genius for mathematics, saw that Descartes' view of material 
substance presented insuperable difficulties to any attempt to 
determine the relations of parts to the whole. Infinite divisi- 
bility and a continuum are inconsistent concepts; for, when an 
ultimate indivisible point is reached, it ceases to be real: further- 
more, a part is not a part, except in relation to a whole, and a 
whole is not a whole, except in relation to its parts, while in mere 
extension there are no intrinsic relations. Furthermore, mere 
extension is inert, while activity is everywhere evident in the 
world. To avoid these difficulties, Leibniz represented the 
world, not as a static continuum essentially quantitative, but 
as made up of an infinite number of dynamic units qualitatively 
different, each of which included the world in a representative 
way. Since these units or monads are essentially qualitative, 
each is simple or indivisible and completely isolated. To sus- 
tain its relation to the whole, each is potentially able to ideally 
represent the whole: if it actually contained the whole, there 
could be no distinction between whole and parts. Each, fur- 
thermore, must represent the whole from its own point of view, 
which must differ from that of every other monad, else those 
having the same view -point would be identical. Since there is 
change in the whole, the monads, to keep pace with it, must be 
dynamic, have appetition. From the lowest matter to the 
highest intelligence, each monad mirrors the universe about it, 
and all are kept in accord because of a harmony divinely pre- 
established. In lower forms this mirroring is unconscious per- 
ception; in higher forms it becomes conscious and is called apper- 



The Theory of Leibniz 31 

ception; when self-consciousness and reason are attained, the 
monads become "rational souls" or "spirits." As with Des- 
cartes, clearness and distinctness mark the perfection of ideas. 
At first there is a confused mass of perceptions, which, as the 
monad evolves within itself, become clarified. Matter is con- 
fused perception. The human mind is a monad with great ad- 
vantages for the forming of clear and distinct ideas, because 
of the peculiar organization of other monads with it to form a 
body. 

The theory of Leibniz may be satisfactory in the realm of 
mathematics; but, in a most fundamental way, it is at fault. If 
each monad is completely sundered from all the rest and evolves 
its perceptions from within, how can it know whether other 
monads exist or not? To assume that the human mind is a 
monad leads logically only to solipsism. Leibniz has made 
unprovable assumptions to serve his mathematical interests and 
then, when insurmountable difficulties arose elsewhere in his 
system, found satisfaction after the manner of Descartes in 
referring them to an All-powerful Being. 

The partial point of view which Leibniz has taken in his 
monadology is the individual abstracted from society; the mind, 
from the world; and the intellect, from feeling and will. The 
first abstraction may be traced to that strong individualistic 
trend of thought which found its educational expression in the 
writings of Rousseau; the second distinction was prominent in 
the religious doctrine of the time; and the third is the point of 
view of mathematics, in which Leibniz was strongly interested. 
The underlying idea of development, of self -differentiation, 
when applied to experience as a whole rather than to abstract 
phases of it, and, accordingly, with the assumption of a social 
plasm rather than an isolated monad as the basis of develop- 
ment, has later proved to be very fruitful in its results. 



CHAPTER VII 
The Theory of Kant 

Thought lives upon problems arising in the reconciling of 
apparent differences. To bring together the opposed views 
presented by Locke and Leibniz now became the task of Kant. 
His problem, accordingly, was to determine what is contributed 
by the subject, what by the object, and how these contributions 
are interrelated. In an analysis of perception, he shows that the 
particular matter of sense, the manifold variable, is contributed 
by the object, while the subject contributes the universal forms 
of space and time under which it is known. These forms are 
subjective because that which is external presupposes space as 
the possibility of its existence, while sensations coming one after 
another presuppose time. Mathematics, which is a science of 
necessary and universal validity, is based upon space and time 
and therefore they too must transcend particular experiences. 
When these forms are abstracted, whatever remains in percep- 
tion is the matter of sense, which is never known in its purity 
apart from form. Analogous to the transcendental ego, which 
is felt to be at the basis of subjective manifestations of mind, 
Kant infers that the matter of sense has a transcendental basis 
in a so-called thing-in-itself. In an analysis of the understand- 
ing, the forms of logical judgment are examined and the pure 
formal notions, the categories, are deduced by abstracting from 
the concepts made by these judgments whatever is contributed 
by perception. Thus are found twelve categories, by a combi- 
nation of which all other a priori intelligible forms are produced. 
The sense and understanding, perception and conception, are 
related by space and especially time, which form an integral 
part of the perception and also have the nature of the categories. 
For instance, time and space are involved in the categories of 
relation. After the Critique of the Theoretical Reason has 
thus analyzed pure reason, the Critiques of the Practical Reason 
and Judgment relate reason to will and feeling by showing it to 
contain the principles of conduct and of the emotion of pleasure 



The Theory of Kant 33 

and pain. Kant then is concerned with one phase of the old 
problem of the universal and particular. He has dissected them 
apart cleanly with the skill of a master hand, but the great 
difficulty in the problem of knowledge is to get them together 
again. Kant does not show how this is done, but merely as- 
sumes that in the awakening of thought the particular matter 
takes the initiative. 

The difficulties in Kant's doctrine grow out of its presuppo- 
sitions. In an attempt to discover their respective contribu- 
tions to knowledge, he regards the subject and object as dis- 
parate and attributes to one the universal and to the other the 
particular in knowledge. Just as the ego is regarded as the 
basis of the universal, he is led by the principle of analogy to 
posit a thing-in-itself as the essential basis of the particular or 
matter of sense, an assumption which can never be proved and 
which therefore has no legitimate place in a theory of knowledge. 

While the Kantian analysis has revealed full well the interre- 
lations among the forms of thought, it has not revealed the 
most essential nature of the bridges across the chasms between 
the ego and forms, between the thing-in-itself and matter of 
sense and between form and matter. To do so is impossible, 
because the ego and thing-in-itself are held to be transcendental 
and therefore not objects of thought, while form and matter 
have been assumed to be disparate in the conditions of the 
problem, so that there is provided no wider unity including 
both, in such a way as to reveal the basis of relation. To state 
that the ego is the basis of form, the thing-in-itself the basis of 
matter and that the thing combines in a unitary way both form 
and matter , is to point to the fact that there must be a connection, 
but not to make directly evident its nature. The connection is 
most essentially a dynamic one and consequently not directly 
revealed in a static cross section of experience, but in the dif- 
ferentiation of these apparently contrasting phases of experience 
out of a unitary active process. Then, too, in the Kantian 
theory, the object starts the process in the development of 
knowledge. It awakens the subject to use the categories. But 
subject and object are characteristic of a well-developed knowl- 
edge and prior to knowledge they do not exist. A non-existent 
object cannot act upon a non-existent subject and therefore 
3 I 



34 The Learning Process 

knowledge cannot be accounted for in this way. This is the 
fundamental difficulty in any intellectualistic theory of knowl- 
edge. The very experience whose origin is to be accounted for 
is assumed to begin with. Before subject and object exist, 
there is activity out of which they differentiate, and in this very 
differentiation does knowledge develop. Each stage of differen- 
tiation is a situation or basis from which a new ideal is projected, 
and, in the active realization of this new ideal, is there further 
differentiation, i. e. new knowledge developed. The essential 
activity is not between subject and object, even where these 
exist in consciousness, but between a present situation, of which 
subject and object are terminal aspects, and a projected ideal 
situation. Accordingly, to analyze the relation of subject and 
object is not to analyze the essential dynamic process in which 
knowledge is developed. 

Kant's point of view is that of the mature individual ab- 
stracted from society and the intellect abstracted from feeling 
and will: he gives a mechanical analysis of knowledge as a 
product rather than an account of the process through which it 
developed. The unity between knower and known, subject 
and object, in a unity in the development process and to neglect 
this fact is to be involved at once in an insoluble dualism. 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Theory of Descriptive Science 

The Cartesian dualism of mind and matter is at the basis of 
the descriptive sciences, the purpose of which is to analyze 
objective experience into its elements and to determine the 
causal value of these elements so that they may be used in the 
control of the future. Descriptive science, accordingly, deals 
with abstractions, and therefore can be justified only to the 
extent that it realizes its purpose by being of practical value in 
the control of experience. 

The descriptive science of mind may be designated as psy- 
chology, but this word varies in meaning. In the widest sense it 
includes any study of mind and thus to the idealist may mean his 
philosophy. It is here used, however, to designate rather a 
special science which aims at exactitude in dealing with mental 
phenomena regarded as facts to be described and measured, 
and to be explained according to efficient causation. This dis- 
tinction must be continually kept in mind in the following dis- 
cussion. Psychology then as a special science must objectify, 
analyze and measure. At the outset, two difficulties which do 
not exist for the physical sciences are met with by those who 
uphold this view, (i) The subjective aspect of experience, 
the will attitudes, cannot be objectified, because its essential 
nature is subjective. Any attempt to make the will an object 
reveals it still to be a subject taking attitudes towards an inade- 
quate idea of itself. (2) Mental phenomena, as opposed to 
physical, to make a practical distinction, is the term given to 
those phases of experience which cannot be shared in common 
by all persons, but are only for an individual, and cannot be 
regarded as a basis of causation, which is inconceivable apart 
from matter and motion. To surmount these difficulties, 
psychology must substitute for the real person the psycho- 
physical organism. Then mental phenomena, regarded as facts 
to be described and explained rather than meanings to be under- 
stood, are supposed to be in the head and to parallel certain 



36 The Learning Process 

molecular changes in the brain. Thus can a person be treated 
as an object, while the brain and nervous system, together with 
their interaction with the rest of the organism, give a common 
basis for the description, causal explanation and measurement 
of mental facts. While physical science, aiming to analyze 
objects into elements and determine their causal values, pre- 
supposes an atomism in which all atoms are alike because 
quantitative, psychology seems logically to presuppose, as 
paralleling physical changes in the organism, a psychic atomism 
in which the atoms are all different because qualitative. 

Though psychology, justified by the usefulness of its results, 
regards the mind as being in the head, in reality the head and 
external world are in the mind, if the word mind is used synon- 
ymously with experience. The word external does not mean 
external to mind: it has reference only to relations of things 
within the mind, which may be external to one another. To 
ask the location of mind is a question without meaning, for the 
mind is not anywhere: the spacial relations are within its knowl- 
edge, but the mind itself is not spacial. The difference between 
a fact and an idea is not that one is an external reality and the 
other an internal copy of it. An idea is an hypothesis which, 
when verified by being found to be a satisfactory guide for con- 
duct, becomes a fact: there is no dualism between the two. 
Matter is a permanent possibility of experience. The history of 
world building is the history of ideas becoming facts. What to 
one generation seems to be sufficiently verified to be regarded 
as a fact, may, in the light of the further experience of the 
next, prove itself to be only an idea. A mere idea or hypothesis 
is individual because of the possibility of infinite variation: a 
fact is social because verification has limited its variation and 
thus made it, when abstracted from will attitudes, one truth for 
many knowers. Science finds it advantageous for the sake of 
distinctness to deal with terminal aspects of a process as though 
they were independent realities and to regard them under the 
analogy of space concepts: accordingly, psychology looks upon 
the idea as a reality within the mind imagined to be in an indi- 
vidual organism, and upon facts as realities without the mind 
and existing whether they are known or not. The only account 
which psychology can give of the development of knowledge is 



The Theory of Descriptive Science 37 

to trace in a mechanical way how representative ideas are 
brought about in the head of the organism. A stimulus from 
the external world affects the sense organ and is carried to the 
brain by the afferent nerves, there certain molecular brain 
changes are accompanied by sensation, a reaction takes place 
through the medium of the efferent nerves and the brain matter 
is further disturbed. Upon such a basis does psychology account 
for the origin and development of knowledge, from the simplest 
sensation to the most complex idea. Since it regards only 
efficient causal values, psychology naturally views knowledge 
as a mechanical construct. In the complete knowing process, 
ethical values as well as efficient causal values are involved. 
Psychology therefore may analyze, describe, explain and measure 
mental phenomena at various stages, but it cannot give the 
truest genetic account of the development of knowledge, since 
the truest genetic account must take into consideration ethical 
factors to which the limited purpose of psychology makes it 
blind. The expression "purpose of psychology" itself points 
to the ethical factor in the development of knowledge which 
gives meaning to the very science that denies it. The develop- 
ment of knowledge is in the growth of meanings, and meanings 
have their subjective as well as their objective reference: they are 
meanings for somebody as well as objective relations. The mean- 
ing is not complete without its worth to be appreciated as well as 
its causal value to be measured. Therefore, the subjective will 
and emotions as factors of meaning cannot be neglected in ac- 
counting for knowledge: and, as these are manifested only in the 
active life of a real person, the knowledge process must be studied 
as a phase of the life process of a person, not of a fictitious psy- 
cho-physical organism. Indeed, a meaning, or idea, objectified as 
a fact for scientific dissection differs as much from the real 
essence of the meaning as a psycho-physical organism differs 
from a real person, and for the same reason. The psychological 
account of the development of knowledge is justifiable for the 
sake of certain practical purposes, but it does not take so wide 
a point of view as epistemology, and, consequently, when con- 
clusions conflict, those of epistemology are to be given the 
preference. However, the wider view does not destroy the 
narrower one, but, on the contrary, includes it in such a way as 



38 The Learning Process 

to reveal it in wider relations, which, when understood, give its 
conclusions a deeper significance and harmonize them with the 
deeper truth. Epistemology does not refute psychology, but, 
by revealing its purposes and limitations, includes it; and, ac- 
cordingly, in the solution of epistemological problems, may use 
psychological conclusions thus known in a truer light. 1 The 
value of psychology in the control of the knowing process is not 
to directly reveal the elements of control and their values, so 
much as to afford certain practical tests of the values of other 
processes of control. The teacher has an ethical rather than a 
scientific attitude toward the pupil. The pupil is not regarded 
as a psycho-physical organism and his ideas as objective facts. 
Both teacher and pupil in the teaching process (cf. pp. 55-57) 
must be absorbed in the appreciation of purposes and the mean- 
ing of elements of control within the study. Not the ideas as 
facts, but the meaning of the ideas are the important elements 
of control here. The problems in the school are how to differen- 
tiate the pupil's experience through the interrelation of mean- 
ings in the subject matter studied. A consciousness of psy- 
chology is no more useful in teaching a problem in geometry 
than a consciousness of the anatomy and physiology of the legs 
is useful in teaching a child to walk: desires and mathematical 
relations are the conscious elements of control in the one case, 
and desires and sensations in the other. A descriptive science 
in its great complexity centers attention upon its own elements 
as means of control: a normative science, as that of education 
must be, points beyond itself, offering a simple principle for the 
selection of other elements of control. This distinction, it 
must be remembered, is not absolute, but one of degree. Psy- 
chology, as it is interpreted in the present chapter, furthermore, 
assumes to begin with as a basis of explanation that which it is 
the province of the theory of knowledge to explain, and seeks 
to further differentiate this by experimental analysis : it assumes 
a psycho-physical organism and disregards as foreign to its 
purpose the reconciliation of the illogical dualism between mind 
and matter. Unfortunately, the application of this psychologi- 
cal dualism to educational theory without discrimination of its 
peculiar province and limitations as the basis of a descriptive 

1 With this justification, some psychological conclusions are made use of in the tenth 
chapter of this essay. 



The Theory of Descriptive Science 39 

science, justified only by the practical needs which it serves, 
has emphasized a mechanical theory of knowledge which makes 
prominent the giving of information, the getting of facts through 
the "windows of the soul" into the memory rather than the 
logical building of a world. This to some extent has been 
mitigated unconsciously by an inconsistent mixture of norma- 
tive disciplines with psychology and through its application by 
teachers who are not wholly given over to the scientific abstrac- 
tion, but the scientific dualism is still widely used as a basis of 
educational theorv. 



CHAPTER IX 
Modern Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 

The development of modern theory corresponds to that of 
the Greek not only in that it began with rationalism following a 
period of skepticism; but also in that, under the influence of 
biology, it has come to have much in common with the later 
development of Greek thought as embodied in the writings of 
Aristotle. Naturally, it has made an advance both in the 
refinement of problems and in the extent of the field studied. 
An individual in the stream of thought finds it practically im- 
possible to get a comprehensive view of the whole contemporary 
movement and to appreciate the many currents and counter- 
currents beyond the particular eddy which is encircling him. 
The discussion in this chapter, accordingly, is merely an attempt 
to give expression to some modern tendencies of thought which 
appear to deal with the problem of knowledge in a way that 
promises to be most satisfactory and which may offer some- 
thing of value to educational theory. The theory of knowledge 
is a product of knowledge and consequently a construct of 
judgments based upon observed data. It is necessary first to 
see clearly the data, to get a right point of view. The data 
themselves in turn are the product of knowledge, of judgments 
made so habitually that they have become unconscious : accord- 
ingly, what seems to be a fact immediately given is, in truth, a 
complex mental construct. To make over old conceptions into 
truer ones, judgments naively formed and fixed by habit must 
be brought again to consciousness and tested in the light of 
later judgments. One fact gets its meaning in the light of all 
the rest: its meaning is its true relation to the whole. Conse- 
quently, when a theory of knowledge is made from a point of 
view which neglects some of the facts, the conclusions, as in 
most typical cases already considered in this essay, are open to 
criticism. A point of view which includes all the facts must 
take in experience as a whole: if there is anything which does 
not lie within experience, it is not known and cannot be a factor 
in the theory of knowledge. 



Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 41 

Experience, as known in its widest form, is individual. The 
experience of other persons must always find its interpreta- 
tion in terms of the self. To read or eject this interpretation 
into another person regarded objectively as being within a 
physical body , is to make him one of the many objects of knowl- 
edge for the self: the world then appears to be duplicated and 
truth to be the correspondence between this experience which 
is read into him and the world in which he appears to be only 
one of the objects. Only a little reflection is necessary to reveal 
the fact that the mind is not, in reality, within the human body, 
but that the human body, as well as other objects of experience, 
is within the mind. The duplicating of one's own experience 
in considering it both within and without another individual, 
or even one's self regarded objectively, is the fundamental 
fallacy of dualistic theories of knowledge. This dualism can 
occur only among objects of knowledge and therefore is a 
partial view because it neglects the individuality that unifies 
them. Unity or individuality is one phase of all experience 
just as truly as diversity or plurality is another. The idea of 
diversity or plurality could never occur unless it were experienced 
in a unity, for diversity or plurality is a relation and there can 
be no relation where there is no unity. If things are not unified, 
they cannot be separate. Without individuality to unify it, 
the world vanishes into meaningless unrelated atoms just as 
truly as individuality without a diversity to give it character 
becomes an empty abstraction. The self can use individual 
experience to interpret that of others, and, in turn, the interpre- 
tation of other's experience may throw light upon one's own, 
but no satisfactory account of knowledge can be obtained by 
ejecting one's experience both within and without another 
individual and attempting to find a direct causal relation between 
these ejects. 

Although the widest point of view is individual experience, 
this individual experience is also social. I am in others and 
others are in me. This is a necessary interpretation of exper- 
ience, the only alternatives of which lead to pluralism, which 
has been found to be illogical, and to solipsism, in which no one 
can believe. Therefore , while the widest experience is individual, 
it contains within itself society, which can in turn be made a 



42 The Learning Process 

basis to explain how the individual experience came to be what 
it is. Thus does individual experience reveal itself to be the 
product of social realization. And, since society is interpreted 
by ejecting within objects in individual consciousness the ex- 
perience which is first felt to be individual, nothing can be 
known as characteristic of society which is not first received as 
an individual experience : society is a construct out of individual 
experience as a necessary interpretation of itself. Therefore, 
the problem of knowledge in its primary form is a problem to 
be solved within experience considered as individual, for it must 
first be determined how I know in order to understand how any- 
body else knows. 

Since nothing without experience can be used to explain it, 
the growth of knowledge is in the evolution of experience and 
all that can be known regarding it is the process by which this 
evolution takes place, the internal law of its development. 
Even the question of the validity of knowledge involves no 
idea of " copy " or " correspondence " to some independent 
reality, but can be answered only in relation to this internal 
development. To present the problem in its simplest form, an: 
account should be given of the beginning of knowledge in any 
individual. The conditions underlying the beginning of his 
conscious experience are not directly known by an individual, 
of course, because they precede whatever he knows. An account 
of these conditions, therefore, can be based only upon impli- 
cations in the analysis of mature experience where the expla- 
nation of the conscious life of others gives ground for the expla- 
nation of that of the self. 

An interpretation of others makes it appear that at first there 
is activity which is not consciously directed ; movements are made 
at random. In this way by repetition certain movement 
complexes become habitual, especially those which give expres- 
sion to instincts. There is no direct consciousness of movements 
which are completely controlled by habit; but, when habitual 
co-ordinations are interfered with, consciousness is born. Out 
of this consciousness, as it develops in connection with activity, 
all the various phases of mental life appear to be differentiated, 
from the simplest to the most complex. An apple is placed 
before a child. The instinctive act fixed by habit, in such a 



Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 43 

situation, is for the child to reach for the apple. If the activity, 
which is a very complex one involving eye and other co-ordina- 
tions together with those of the arm and hand, is impeded or 
unsuccessful, there arises in the child's consciousness sensation 
together with desire, and these are accompanied by random 
movements that may through indirection, through some "means" 
get satisfaction. Crying is perhaps the first means experienced. 
Out of a great multiplicity and variety of such experiences is 
differentiated the consciousness of means for satisfying desires. 
Out of this arise problems of control, and thought with its 
logical method of dealing with experience in solving them. 
Thought is essentially the trying of actions in imagination in 
order to discover which is best adapted to realize a conscious 
desire. An advantage which thought has over random activity 
in finding the more satisfactory adjustment, aside from imaginary 
action, comparatively speaking, being practically immune from 
consequences, is due to the fact that, by dealing with abstract 
phases of situations, only essential features may be attended to: 
this, at once, makes it possible to eliminate countless useless 
reactions, and, because the abstract feature is common to many 
familiar situations, if essential, it suggests valuable tried ele- 
ments of activities from which a selection can be made. Thought 
is developed in the activities of life through the process of realiz- 
ing purposes, and derives its whole significance from the fact 
that it is an intermediary stage between obstructed or conflicting 
habits and successful harmonious action. In this connection, 
it is worthy to note that many of the terms which mean thought- 
ful, such as crafty, cunning, clever, wise as a serpent, etc., have 
in them the idea of indirection, of getting around impediments 
which stand in the way of direct or habitual activity. Out of 
impeded activity apparently, then, in the process of making 
over old habits into new ones, are differentiated in consciousness 
the self and the world, purpose, desire including emotions, and 
thought. This differentiation is gradual. The world of the 
child and the world of the adult are not the same. The child 
does not see or hear or feel all at once the world as it appears to 
the adult, but must slowly learn to see, hear, feel, taste, smell 
and also to desire, purpose and think. The direction of this 
learning is guided by attention and attention is selective in the 



44 The Learning Process 

service of his activity. As a child develops his world, he devel- 
ops also his individuality. The self and nature develop from a 
social plasm and individuality is a final stage in the process of 
this development. 

So far as a general distinction can be made, desire (feeling) 
is the basis of the appreciation of worth and out of it come ethical 
values; thought is concerned essentially with efficient causal 
values. One sets the aim for the activity and the other gives 
the means of control whereby the aim may be reached. 
The aim and means however are not disparate but com- 
plementary. They are terminal aspects which the finest 
analysis cannot completely separate: the aim always contains 
some thought and the means some appreciation. In knowledge 
as socially accumulated, the one is emphasized in religion, 
literature, art and history, and the other in science. Even 
whole social movements in the history of mental progress may 
be characterized by the dominancy of one or the other of these 
in their natural order. The Renaissance, or humanistic move- 
ment, was one of appreciation; it established ideals: the Baconian 
or scientific movement was one of control ; it furnished a method 
for controlling experience in the realization of ideals. 

Appreciation is immediate and emotional and therefore cannot 
be objectified and analyzed. It is the conscious thrill of the 
self realizing its true nature. To use a psychological analogy, as 
the world of "external" vibration is revealed in color, sound 
and other qualitative sensations, so the tensions in our habits 
are revealed in feelings of worth. The validity of knowledge 
can have no higher sanction than its ability to guide to the 
realization of that which is appreciated. 

Means to these appreciated ends become conceptually sepa- 
rated into things; thinking indeed is etymologically thing- 
ing — it constitutes the values of things as means by putting 
meaning into them, and, since a means gets its values or signifi- 
cance by relations to the ends, the meaning of a thing is its 
relations. In the service of any particular activity, the essential 
meaning of a thing is its causal relation in that activity. By 
virtue of its relations to ends from which it can be separated 
only conceptually, a thing involves in its meaning also some 
appreciation. Since the idea, or accepted meaning of a thing, 



Modern Voluntanstic Monistic Theory 45 

is nothing apart from the ends for which it has value, the com- 
plete idea of a thing is a plan of action or a composite of plans 
of action. Things are the product of thought in the service of 
action; and, in their relation to thought, they may be viewed 
either as to their use as products or to the process by which they 
are formed, although these two phases cannot be sharply sepa- 
rated. 

As products, things become elements for the understanding 
of the meanings of situations of which they are component 
parts. Thought consists of both analysis and synthesis. By a 
process of analysis, situations are reduced to simpler facts 
through the noting of similarities, of immediate or remote 
practical value, in various situations and abstracting them from 
the phases which are unlike, and these facts are reduced to still 
simpler ones by the same process more refined, until the ele- 
ments, or facts which cannot be further analyzed, are reached. 
Then, to understand any situation is to see how these facts or 
things synthetically make it. When the elements have been 
thus taken into consideration, the completest possible knowledge 
has been reached. At any stage in this process of analysis, 
what is attended to may be regarded as a thing, so long as, for 
the purpose in view, it has one whole of meaning. Thus a town, 
a house, a brick or a molecule of the brick may be regarded as a 
thing. Each thing has a number of meanings of its own 
according to the relations in which it has been found valuable, 
but all of these meanings are not pertinent to one situation. 
The ringing of an electric bell may mean that someone is at the 
door or at the telephone or at the dumb-waiter shaft. Other 
things must be considered and a selection of meanings made. 
In combination with other things, or meaningful aspects, of the 
situation, some meanings are neutralized and the meaning that is 
left which is harmonious to all things in the situation, is the 
meaning of the situation. For instance, when the ringing of a 
bell, according to the analysis of previous situations, may mean 
that someone is at the door or at the telephone or at the dumb- 
waiter shaft, the thought that a caller is expected and the 
sound of someone in the hall may suggest which hypothesis is 
probably true and indicate what else within the situation should 
be observed in order to make the hypothesis a fact and reveal 



46 The Learning Process 

the meaning of the situation. If, when the door is opened, the 
hall is seen to be empty, a new fact is discovered which has, 
roughly speaking, no meaning consistent with the hypothesis, 
and thus neutralizes for this situation one meaning of the ring- 
ing of the bell and destroys the hypothesis suggested. The 
thought then that the caller might telephone to explain his 
failure to come may make another meaning for the situation 
seem probable. If a voice is heard through the receiver, the 
hypothesis that the telephone bell was ringing becomes practi- 
cally a fact and the meaning of the telephone call comes as a new 
problem, the old situation merging into a new one, the meaning 
of which is now to be determined. This is the general logical 
procedure in synthetically forming the meaning of a situation, 
whether in the thinking of the common every-day life or in the 
professionally refined thinking of the chemist and astronomer. 
By threads of abstraction, every fact is connected with every 
other fact, and the task of thought in its synthetic use of hypothe- 
sis and proof is to find the thread directly common to all the 
facts of any given situation. The recognizing of separate 
things, the analysis into elements, is for the sake of again com- 
bining them to make larger wholes explainable. When the 
meaning of a situation is determined, one's active adjustment 
to it is revealed to be inharmonious, and further activity is 
called forth in the interest of a more harmonious adjustment. 
How to control the elements of a situation so as to bring about 
a suggested new situation with a more harmonious adjustment 
becomes a problem for thought. The elements or things are 
adjusted in the imagination through logical processes and syn- 
thetically formed into a new idea, a plan of action, which nor- 
mally, when definitely formed, is actively realized. This pro- 
cess of more harmonious adaptation is unending and the funda- 
mental condition of conscious life. The methods of activity 
involved in realized ideas are conserved as unconscious habits, 
and consciousness is thus freed to progress by actively engaging 
in solving new problems necessary to new and finer adjust- 
ments. The ringing of the bell causes readjustment to answer 
the telephone, answering the telephone causes readjustment to 
prepare to entertain the speaker at dinner with the many ad- 
justments involved in this, as ordering food, having it served, 



Modem Voluntaristic Monistic Theory 47 

etc. How to answer the telephone may have become a habit, 
but many activities necessary in preparing to entertain the 
guest would probably not be habitual, and, accordingly, require 
thought. The readjustment progresses socially, the activities 
of other persons being involved, each with his own related 
tensions and problems. Situations, like things, are not separate 
and distinct in themselves, but merely aspects of an infinitely 
complex social movement. Not only does the whole situation 
find its meaning in the elements which by synthesis make it, 
but the meaning of the whole is reflected so as to more closely 
determine the meanings of the elements. What is a situation 
to one class of facts may become a fact as an element of a wider 
situation. Thus does social experience become a whole of 
interrelated meanings, into the ultimate, most inclusive mean- 
ing of which it is the purpose of philosophy and religion to gain 
insight. 

In the process of developing meanings, of making things, 
analogy is the fundamental principle of procedure. The world 
of knowledge is full of analogies, whether it be that of the ancient 
philosophers who viewed the universe as essentially air, fire or 
water, or whether it be that of the modern scientist with his 
atoms and etherial vibrations. The early animistic interpre- 
tation of material objects is due to the same principle which 
later led to a materialistic interpretation of mind. The present 
meaning of matter is shot through with subjective qualities. 
No one by analysis can find cause or force, substance or individ- 
uality in a material object. These categories can come to 
consciousness only through experience and they are experienced 
only in manifestations of will, in activity of a person. The 
analogy is so habitually made that there seems to be given in 
immediate experience of the object that which could come only 
indirectly through being read into it from another phase of 
experience. This debt is repaid by material analogies in the 
mental world, where there are bright ideas, deep thought, sharp 
wit, caustic criticism and dull comprehension. Again, in the 
development of science, each is interpreted in the light of the 
one developed earlier. The matter and motion of physics are 
read into chemistry; the concepts of chemistry, into biology 
and physiology; and the concepts of biology and physiology, 



48 The Learning Process 

into psychology. Furthermore, we have no direct knowledge 
of other persons: our whole understanding of them is through 
analogy based upon our own experience. In fact, it is the very 
nature of thought to use images and schemes 1 , so that the 
world of knowledge becomes an intricate symbolic construct 
the highest justification of which is that it works, that it gives 
control of experience. Here the particular sciences have an 
advantage over philosophy and religion; for, while the former 
interpret one phase of experience in terms of another, the latter 
try to interpret all in terms of a part; and while the value of a 
scientific interpretation can easily be tested, that of a philosophic 
or religious one cannot. Again, in science, causal necessity — 
a relation in time — is treated as logical necessity — a relation 
in meaning. Science has a greater certainty than philosophy 
or religion because it can treat qualitative differences in experi- 
ence as quantitative, and thus, by regarding them as due to 
matter and motion and under a numerical scheme, can accurately 
predict the future. Progress then in the building of a world in 
consciousness is by interpreting one phase of experience in terms 
of another, the development of symbolism, in which, through 
habitual use, the fact that the interpretation is through analogy 
is lost sight of. The use of symbolism in the play of children, 
when ideas are fast forming, is especially noticeable. In "the 
figurative expression of the deeper insight of the poet and in 
hypotheses in process of verification, the fact of analogy is more 
or less consciously present. When, in the interpretation of 
some fact, the inference or hypothesis suggested by analogy 
with some phase of experience where the relations are similar 
has been tested and proved valid, then habit makes it a part 
of the meaning of the fact itself. The ways in which inferences 
are deliberately formed and tested belong to the province of 
logic. In the logical process, hypotheses are formed through 
following abstract threads of similarity in experiences. Hypoth- 
eses in turn become facts when they are known to be effective 
in giving control over experience. The falling of an apple may 
suggest a new hypothesis, which, when established, becomes the 
fact of gravitation. When a new hypothesis is proved, it natur- 
ally gives a deeper meaning to the facts involved; for it reveals 

1 This fact affects the problem of the disciplinary value of a study. 



Modem V oluntaristic Monistic Theory 49 

new relations, and facts or things are but focus points of relations. 
The phenomena of the sun and planets receive a new meaning 
when the hypothesis that the planets revolve about the sun is 
proved to be true. Through the combination and refinement of 
cross-interpretations, meanings become more and more complex, 
and, in turn, furnish an ever more differentiated and therefore 
more adequate basis for the development of further meanings. 
Reality, therefore, is not static, but in a constant process of 
growth from simple to more complex forms: it is a self-differ- 
entiating unity. 

Vitally connected with the development of control is the devel- 
opment of appreciation. Indeed, control is for the sake of realiz- 
ing that which is appreciated, that which is the object of desire 
and interest. The means gets its value only by virtue of the 
relation which it bears to the end. Appreciation, which ulti- 
mately is an immediate emotional judgment of the value of an 
experience, develops through the experiencing of valuable situa- 
tions either actually or dramatically in imagination. The 
restricted opportunities of ordinary every-day life become very 
much widened through conversation with others and through 
the imaginative experiences offered by religion, art, literature 
and history. When the situation is reproduced in imagination, 
the appreciation is immediate. The difficulties which must be 
controlled in order to have such experiences are those of creating 
the proper imagery. However, the appreciation as well as the 
control phase of knowledge gradually develops with greater and 
greater refinement so that one cannot get the proper apprecia- 
tion of a situation — indeed, the situation does not exist for 
him — if his past experience has not prepared him for it. 

As a person advances in knowledge, his individuality becomes 
more clearly defined; through increased control over his experi- 
ences, the ability to get what he desires, he gains in freedom; 
and, by the widening of his experience, higher, more remote and 
more differentiated ends present themselves, constructive 
imagination picturing desirable experiences which in themselves 
have never before been realized by him. 

Thus far the individual aspect of the development of knowledge 
has been presented. But this development is possible because 
the individual is a social individual. He is in others and others 



50 The Learning Process 

are in him. The same situation is, in a way, common both to 
him and to others. In this community, there is correspondence 
rather than identity, because different individuals have different 
degrees of realization. Biology expresses a similar truth by 
saying that the environment is relative to the organism. But 
not only is a situation known, in a way, in common: it is also 
controlled in common. One individual, by changing his own sit- 
uation, also changes that of another, whose habits are thus inter- 
fered with. The meaning of the change may not be the same 
to both: its interpretation in either case depends upon the past 
experience of each individual. This community of knowledge 
and control is the basis of the accumulation of knowledge. 
This accumulation has come very slowly. Even the simplest 
ideas have been ages in the making, each generation vicariously 
helping to create the world in which the next is to live. And 
this has been possible because, through changing the common 
situation or environment, one person can, whether purposely or 
not, direct the experience of another. As the inner experiences 
of individuals find their expression in outer form, matter, that 
which is in a degree common to all as a permanent possibility 
of experience, is made the bearer of purposes and ever becomes 
more spiritualized. The adjustment to this spiritualized en- 
vironment and consequent realization of its meaning is always 
a result of individual activity on the part of others, whereby the 
outer form becomes the condition of inner experience of 
which it was originally the expression. As a medium in which 
individuals' experiences may be registered so as to exist in 
possibility for others, matter is the ultimate social bond and the 
bearer of social purpose. In this way each generation has been 
taken through those types of experience which the race has 
found to be most valuable, and, after adding its own small con- 
tribution, has passed it on as an inheritance to the next. This 
inheritance, again, is never something to be given from without 
but comes to the individual only when he actively passes through 
types of racial experience, society making this possible by 
determining the situations in relation to which he acts. In the 
service of accumulating, conserving and transmitting this 
inheritance, institutions have arisen as social habits, including 
language, home, civil society, state, church and school. 



CHAPTER X 
Educational Implications 

For countless generations, education was the result only of 
imitative play and active participation in the community life; 
but, as the race developed and its experience became very wide 
and very complex, there arose from necessity a special institu- 
tion the purpose of which is to consciously direct the activities 
of the younger generations in such a way that typical forms of 
experience which the race has found most valuable are repeated 
in their experience. Thus the school, as a conscious attempt to 
promote human evolution, economizes energy and makes a 
greater development possible. The problem of this chapter is 
to give, in the light of the theory of knowledge accepted, some 
general interpretation of the working of the school. 

The three most essential features of the school may be con- 
ceptually separated into the curriculum, which represents the 
social phase and gives values; the nature of the child, or individ- 
ual agent through which values socially determined are realized ; 
and the method of teaching, or the process by which the child is 
influenced to repeat selected typical experiences. 

The Curriculum. The curriculum is for the teacher and 
indicates the direction which the child's experience is to take. 
It should represent those types of experience which have been 
found by the race to include the most satisfactory ends and the 
best means of control for attaining these ends: in other words, 
to develop the truest sense of values and a knowledge of laws 
necessary to their realization. Under the guidance of this 
formal principle, the actual content of the curriculum must be 
determined empirically. 

In the school there is much of educative value that is not 
mapped out in the curriculum. Aside from any special studies, 
a child's social intercourse with teachers and pupils exercises a 
most powerful influence in the development of his sense of 
worth. As he can understand others only by putting himself in 
their places in imitative play or in a more or less imaginative 



52 The Learning Process 

way and then ejecting his experience into his ideas of them, by 
understanding them he widens his own experience, and, by 
solving the little problems which arise in his own situations 
every day, he gains in control; but all this is characteristic of 
the life process everywhere. The distinctive work of the school 
is to consciously direct this by means of selected branches of 
study; or, in other words, selected typical experiences. Those 
studies in which the appreciation aspect is more prominent are 
called humanistic; those in which the control aspect is more 
prominent, scientific. 

The humanistic branches are literature, art, history and 
religion. Among these no hard and fast distinctions can be 
drawn. They .agree in that they are essentially understood 
subjectively through emotional attitudes, whether ethical or 
aesthetic. In history and religion, the will attitudes are more 
prominent; in art, the aesthetic, or the feeling of pure worth 
with the will or activity minimized; and in literature both. 
While art and literature include many experiences more or less 
complete and satisfactory in themselves, history and religion 
look to an all-inclusive unity from the subjective side. Religion 
tends to become the attitude taken towards reality as a whole, 
while history works toward a unity in men's will attitudes or 
purposes, showing how one will attitude or purpose binds another 
so that all may be viewed in relation to a subjective unified 
whole. The belief in a world purpose is essential to religion; 
and, too, purpose is essential to history, for this category alone 
can unify the multiplicity of human acts by giving meaning to 
them. The objective facts of religion and history are the 
symbolic guides in this interpretation. Thus do these human- 
istic subjects include the best of the world's experience in which 
the appreciation aspect is more prominent. To be understood 
they must be relived ; and, in the reliving of them, is an individual 
taken from a narrow and mean life to one of world-wide signifi- 
cance, in which the ambitions of rulers, the ecstasy of artists and 
the devotion of saints may to a greater or less extent become a 
part of his own experience. 

In the earliest experience of the race, all interpretation was 
of this subjective character; for an animistic interpretation of 
nature consisted of reading or ejecting into natural objects 



Educational Implications 55 

subjective phases of experience. But gradually, from the 
animistic interpretation, one personal element after another 
has been eliminated by abstraction until there is left only such 
ideas as force, individuality and substance which are of subjec- 
tive origin. With the elimination of such characteristics of 
personality as purpose, feeling, freedom, the objective phenomena 
became strongly contrasted with the subjective. Objects were 
no longer emotionally appreciated in order to be understood, 
for there was no love nor hate nor any other form of personal 
relationship. It then became possible to abstract the objective 
phenomena from all subjectivity and unemotionally regard 
them as constituting a purely fatalistic realm, in order to discover 
their independent value in the realization of purpose, in deter- 
mining the future — their value in efficient causation. This was 
found by the discovery of uniformities in causal values, when, 
in the interest of particular problems of control, observations 
were made and hypotheses formed and proved. Thus was science 
born. The mental process through which it develops has been 
analyzed so as to give a scientific method; and, in the service of 
this, a more and more elaborate technique is being devised. 
Scientific method is never more than a means of controlling 
experience in the interest of some purpose, some end, ideologic- 
ally and not efficiently determined. It is therefore always a 
servant and never a master. Therefore it can never exhaust 
the essence of personality, of will, although by substituting the 
psycho-physical organism for the real person, some natural 
law may be discovered in the spiritual realm to be used in the 
interest of control. 

Every fact has its worth to be appreciated as well as its 
causal value to be understood. The sciences which deal with 
object matter, the meaning of which involves more prominently 
efficient causal values, give exactitude and are merely descrip- 
tive; the sciences which deal with subject matter, the meaning 
of which involves more prominently the appreciation of worth, 
or final causal values, give insight rather than exactitude and 
are normative. The one is chiefly concerned with what is; the 
other, with what ought to be. The one tells directly and pre- 
cisely what must be done in order to accomplish a desired 
result; for instance, if one wishes to make oxygen, he must 



54 The Learning Process 

treat potassium chlorate under accurately denned conditions: 
the other reveals a criterion whereby the more teleological values 
of possible courses of action may be objectively judged in the 
interest of a remoter end the worth of which is only immediately 
felt; for instance, if a person has in mind some objective act, 
the golden rule of the Bible or the golden mean of Aristotle or 
the categorical imperative of Kant is intended to give a means 
whereby its relative worth may be determined. In grammar, 
logic, ethics, aesthetics and education, normative principles are 
revealed by an objective study of the concrete data of what 
is felt ought to be. The distinction between the descriptive 
and normative phases of a science is relative rather than absolute : 
ethics, for instance, is more normative than grammar, and physics 
more descriptive than sociology. Descriptive sciences are in a 
degree normative, and normative sciences are in a degree descrip- 
tive. In the control of experience, a mere knowledge of norma- 
tive science is comparatively valueless, except as a guide in the 
choice of activities otherwise determined. Apart from origin- 
ality in arguments, conduct, or methods of teaching, logic 
never made a good debater ; ethics, a just man ; or theory of educa- 
tion, a good teacher. Progress here is made by eliminating the 
worse and following the better activities, as revealed by the 
criteria of judgment given in these sciences. In science, either 
the form or the content of objective experience may be empha- 
sized. In mathematics, the quantitative forms of time and 
space are abstracted, and, accordingly, single observations are 
of universal validity. In the so-called natural sciences, the 
particular qualitative content is regarded and thus a large number 
of observations becomes an important factor. If the two are 
united, the qualitative facts being translated into temporal 
and spacial and therefore mathematical schemes, an exactitude 
is reached which greatly increases control. Biology, psychology 
and sociology are less precise than physics and chemistry, because 
such translation has not, to any great extent, been made. How- 
ever, in the development of scientific technique, mathematical 
schemes for the measurement of variable quantities have been 
devised, so that the less exact sciences are becoming more 
precise. 



Educational Implications 55 

Appreciation and control are but phases of one process. 
Means and end are distinguished only by greater emphasis on 
one or another aspect of a unitary process or plan of action. 
There is no means wholly without worth and no product inde- 
pendent of the process out of which it came. Every purpose, 
no matter how immediate and insignificant, involves both of 
them. What is means for a more remote purpose involves an 
end for a more immediate one. Thus does every activity bring 
a realization of worth, so that the work of the school not only 
prepares the child for higher realization later, but is a part of the 
child's life worthy for its own sake. Both control and apprecia- 
tion should receive normal emphasis in this moral development. 
The humanistic subjects may awaken the judgment of ideals, 
which reveal the deeper significance of daily activities, but the 
worth of these ideals does not become in any degree realized in 
the life of the child until his daily activities are controlled with 
reference to them. However remote the ideal may be, if it is a 
worthy one, conduct with reference to it is registered in moral 
habits, or, in other words, good character. If control is neg- 
lected, mere appreciation degenerates into vapid sentimental- 
ism, injurious because it develops habitual tendencies opposed to 
worthful activity; and, if appreciation is neglected, activity loses 
the meaning which makes it worthful. Both scientific and 
humanistic phases, in some degree, are inseparably involved in 
every experience of the child. One is essentially the expression 
of intellect and the other of feeling, while will is their active 
realization in the unity of experience. As complementary 
aspects united in will, they exhaust social experience, and con- 
sequently there is no dualism in the curriculum. 

The Child. The learning experience of the child is a con- 
tinuous process which originates, exists and ends in activity. 
It begins when habits of action are obstructed or conflict and 
has as its end successful harmonious action. The conscious 
process involving the tension on the one hand and the successful 
action on the other has four prominent aspects: — 

(a) A purpose growing out of a tendency to act and present- 
ing as its terminal aspects an actual situation felt to be unsatis- 
factory and a desired ideal state partially at least defined in the 
light of past experience. The tendency to act is primarily 



56 The Learning Process 

determined by an instinctive equipment, which varies in differ- 
ent children and in the same child at different ages. The 
child's interests are relative to these instincts, the significance 
and worth of which can be determined only in the light of the 
curriculum, for it embodies the best forms of expression that 
social experience has found for them. 

(b) A logical process of thinking, an imaginary constructing 
and testing, which determines the plan of control by which the 
present may be transformed into the ideal situation. It is true 
that the mere solution of a thought problem may itself be the 
immediate end desired, as in the case of a student of descriptive 
science or of ethics; yet normally this end is never ultimate, but 
rather a means to the satisfaction of needs which have arisen in 
social experience. Thought, as other activities, may be advanced 
through co-operation where individuals become specialists, 
attending to particular phases of it. But even in this special- 
ization, however narrow it may be, whatever thinking is done 
has all of the features of thought in its wider significance. 

(c) An activity which is guided by the knowledge resulting 
from the logical process of thinking, and which controls the 
child's experience so that, if the logical process is true, the 
tension which gave rise to his purpose is removed, and, in so far 
as this particular tension is concerned, the situation becomes 
harmonious and satisfactory. The successful activity is con- 
served by habit, and, in the process of repetition, tends to become 
unconscious. In this activity new experience is gained. 

(d) The organization of the new experience with the old, the 
unitary result as habit giving meaning to a new situation. In 
this new situation tensions at once arise, leading to a new ideal 
and thus forming a new purpose. 

This process continues during conscious life. The four 
aspects which have been conceptually abstracted do not occur 
one after another, each being completed before the subsequent 
one appears; but they involve one another in such a way that 
there is a constant movement back and forth among them, 
each being more or less defined by the others. This process is 
always one of self-activity from its origin in instinctive impulse 
to the accumulation, through habit, of appreciations of worth 
and plans of control, forming continuously an apperceptive 



Educational Implications 57 

mass which gradually creates the child's world, defines his 
individuality; and, by gradually making him master of his situa- 
tions, gives him an ever-increasing freedom. 

The Teacher. The school-room life is normal for the teacher 
as well as for the pupil; and, accordingly, he grows in experience 
through his own purposes, thought, activities and organization 
of habits: but the peculiar function of the teacher in the school 
room process is to mediate between the child and the curriculum.. 
The further problem has to do with the nature of this mediation. 

The teacher, naturally, must have a knowledge of both terms 
of the mediation and the ability to interrelate them; in other 
words, he must have (a) a full and rich experience of the nature 
of that selected in the curriculum, (b) insight into the nature and 
degree of the realization of the mind of the pupil and its instinc- 
tive tendencies, and (c) ability to create those situations the 
active responses to which will cause the child to pass through 
the desirable types of experience indicated in the curriculum. 

(a) Since the curriculum is not something apart to be mechan- 
ically transmitted, but types of being which exist only in active 
experience, the teacher, first of all, must have sound scholarship. 
The character of his scholarship determines the degree and 
definiteness to which the curriculum exists for him, and only as 
the curriculum exists in his own experience can he see the poten- 
tial values in the child's activities or guide them to desirable 
forms of realization. Since every new and richer experience 
enriches the meaning of all the rest, the better the teacher's 
scholarship, the more definite and exact become his understand- 
ing of the meaning of the curriculum, even in its more elementary 
forms. Unfortunately, what often stands for sound scholarship 
involves pedantic, or perverted, types of experience which have 
grown out of the school itself and which have no real worth in 
genuine education. The purpose of the school is not to condi- 
tion new kinds of experience peculiarly its own, but to condition 
experience valuable independently of it. Thus only by losing 
itself does the school find salvation. Much of the teaching 
today is tainted by this perverted scholarship, which persists 
through tradition and which can be eliminated only through a 
deeper insight into the real meaning of education. 



58 The Learning Process 

(b) Again, since the curriculum is not something apart to be- 
mechanically transmitted, but types of being which exist only 
in active experience, the teacher must have an insight into the 
nature and degree of realization of the child's mind together 
with its instinctive tendencies. New experience grows out of 
the old. A situation for the teacher is not the same for the child, 
because a situation depends upon past experience and much that 
the teacher sees and feels is not there for the child, while some 
aspects which are not present for the teacher are experienced by 
the child. Interest, which is essentially related to instinctive 
tendency, is a determining factor in defining a situation. Now 
only that which is a conscious situation for the child is effective 
in his education. Since one person understands another by eject- 
ing his own experience into his idea of that person, a teacher 
may be prone to deal with a situation as though it were identical 
for both him and his pupil. Conditions which make a typically 
valuable situation for the teacher may make a comparatively 
worthless situation for the child and produce a comparatively 
worthless activity. A child brought up in the slums and one 
educated in a refined community may have neither the same 
appreciations nor the same problems under what for the teacher 
is a unitary situation. Between these two extremes, there are 
numerous social classes, the children of each of which have a 
more or less different character of realization; and, even in the 
same class, the experiences of no two individuals are identical. 
Interests and appreciations, too, vary with instinctive equip- 
ment. For instance, a genuinely romantic experience cannot 
be had before the adolescent instincts have appeared. To 
analyze one's own experience, and, through sympathetic insight, 
to imaginatively construct the world of problems and apprecia- 
tion as it appears to the child, is the starting point for rational- 
ized teaching; for, while the curriculum gives an ideal copy in 
accordance with which the child's experience is to be directed, 
the only material with which the teacher has to work is the child's 
realized world of appreciations and problems, which for the 
teacher must exist as an imaginative construct. 

(c) For the third time, since the curriculum is not something 
apart to be mechanically transmitted, but types of being which 
exist only in active experience, the teacher must have ability to 



Educational Implications 59 

create in the child's experience those situations, the apprecia- 
tions and problems of which condition active responses that 
constitute a gradual realization of the curriculum. Since the 
purpose of the school is to condition the repetition of types of 
experience which the race has found to be valuable, the method 
of teaching is not discovered merely within the walls of the school 
room, but is revealed through an examination of the way in 
which particular experiences to be repeated first came into 
existence. The essentials of the situation in reaction to which 
the desired experience was originally brought about must be 
reproduced in the school. Many situations typically valuable 
can be produced directly in the school. The teacher may be 
of that moral character which socially has been pronounced 
worthful. The school building and its furnishings, especially the 
mural decorations, may represent what socially have been judged 
to be the highest expressions of art. In the laboratory, materials 
may be manipulated so as to produce directly the very tensions 
or problems that stimulated scientific discoverers. Other direct 
situations may be found in museums and on excursions from the 
school building. But the cycles of history cannot be made to 
repeat themselves in the school room, situations in literary 
creations cannot be directly reproduced, excursions cannot be 
made to far away parts of the world. Nature, however, pro- 
vides vivid imagination in which can be reproduced situations, 
the material basis of which cannot be directly presented. As a 
matter of fact, situations consist mostly of imaginary elements 
in any instance. A chief function of the teacher, then, is to 
cause symbols, whether written or spoken, to be translated into 
imagery, and, within that imagery, to create those tensions 
which condition appreciation and thought. Even to the extent 
of becoming unconscious of desks and black-board, the pupil 
must be led in imagination to kneel with Charlemagne and feel 
the thrill of meaning when the king is adorned with the crown 
of the Caesars, to struggle as Hamlet with the opposing motives 
of avenging a father and preserving a mother's honor, to see 
vividly the busy movement of industry in the great cities of 
New York, London and Chicago. Otherwise, his history and 
literature become the mere manipulation of symbols without 
the vital thrill of appreciation; and his geography, the memoriz- 
ing of little colored spots on the map. 



60 The Learning Process 

The failure of the teacher to fully perform his function as has 
been described is liable to result in a predominance of (i) mere 
memory work on the part of the pupils and a consequent (2) lack 
of interest in study, both of which indicate an inferior kind of 
activity. 

(1) As has been shown (p. 51), the school does not exist for 
the purpose of creating experience peculiarly its own, but for the 
purpose of conditioning typical forms of experience which the race 
has found to be most valuable. A study is a typical form of valu- 
able experience, and, unless the child goes through it identically 
in the way in which it was gone through when found to be 
socially valuable, he does not get that experience, but uses the 
symbols intended for it in getting some other experience. The 
use of and knowledge of identical symbols by no means necessi- 
tate identical experiences. As a conscious effort to memorize 
is not generally an important factor in experience as realized 
independently of the school, but rather a by-product of it, a 
predominance of memory work in the school is evidence of a 
perversion of study; it is using the symbols in a way to get a 
different kind of experience from that for which they were prim- 
arily intended. Memorizing as a conscious effort on the part 
of the student is a peculiar kind of experience with ideals and 
problems different from those of the study with which it is con- 
cerned. 

The conscious life process is one of progressive adaptations 
(pp. 42 et seq.) through effort to remove tensions in the individ- 
ual's present situations by realizing ideally projected situations 
through the control of experience. This is the process through 
which knowledge is acquired, through which both the self and 
the world are realized. In the economy of nature, when a new 
and useful adaptation has consciously been made, it is in a 
greater or less degree preserved by habit, so that consciousness 
is more or less freed for the projecting of new ideal situations 
and the solving of problems necessary to their realization. The 
strength and permanence of a habit depends upon the vigor and 
frequency of the adaptation. Now memory is a habit of con- 
sciousness whereby experiences are retained. Unquestionably, 
to fix by habit some physical act copied from another, the act 
must be performed in the exact manner in which the other per- 



Educational Implications 61 

formed it. In no less degree is this true of memory; but, in the 
case of the latter, the fact that thought deals with symbols is 
responsible for misconception. These are looked upon as things 
involving facts to be mechanically impressed upon the memory. 
The reproduction of the symbol may be one experience while the 
reproduction of the meaning for which the symbol stands in the 
study may be another experience, and the failure to recognize 
this leads to confusion. It is indeed impossible to violate the 
law of habit here. Whatever is actually gone through is what 
is remembered, whether it be the manipulation of a symbol so 
as to impress it upon the mind or the more meaningful active 
experience for which the symbol stands; and, since the symbol is 
valueless without the worthful experience symbolized, to the 
extent that memory becomes a conscious effort, to that extent 
is it perverted, to that extent is it aimed not at the goal of the 
original experience, but at a new goal of remembering symbols. 
When an experience is gone through without effort to memorize, 
consciousness is centered upon purposes intrinsic in this expe- 
rience, it projects an ideal and controls experience in the realiza- 
tion of this ideal; but when the pupil consciously makes an 
attempt to memorize that experience, there cannot be two 
goals and two processes of control at the same time, while 
memory superimposes upon the intrinsic experience the ideal of 
fixing it upon the mind and makes the problems of control those 
of how to remember. Accordingly, instead of a valuable and 
complete repetition of the original experience, there are in 
consciousness ideas which symbolize it, which say "I mean 
that" instead of actually being it. This symbolic reference 
is always more or less indefinite, very much so if the original 
experience has not been previously gone through with in a com- 
plete way. The memory experience, therefore, is not the original 
adaptation, but the fixing in consciousness of symbolic ideas 
which have reference to the valuable experience intended. Of 
course, with the symbol there may be associated, more or less, 
the meaning symbolized, as previously learned, so that the 
presence of the symbol carries with it some idea of the meaning, 
and for this reason memory work sometimes brings valuable 
results, but this is in spite of the fact that in the degree that 
memory is made a conscious effort, in that degree the aims of 



62 The Learning Process 

the original experience are neglected and the experience is 
inadequately repeated. A complete idea is a plan of action, 
but in so much as it becomes secondary to another purpose, a 
mere object used in another plan of action, in that degree it is a 
less intensive realization of its complete intrinsic meaning and 
more a mere symbol. Accordingly, when the conscious purpose 
is to memorize, the experience to be memorized is less adequately 
gone through. If the memory experience is the valuable one 
intended, then all is well. Not only does observation reveal 
the fact that mere effort to memorize is not so common out of 
school as in it, but the economy of nature demands that a 
valuable adjustment be remembered per se, rather than through 
another experience superimposed upon it, a supposition which 
psychological investigation seems to support. 

Memory as a habit is a storage of adaptations. The nature 
and value of this storage may be examined still further by 
attending to each of the three phases of the memory process 
— retention, reproduction and recognition. 

By retention is meant the creation of a predisposition to the 
activity, the fixing of the habit. The activity realized is the 
one which becomes a habit and not some other activity — a 
fundamental and obvious principle of habit formation, which 
is of great importance in the understanding of the process of 
memory. Nature economically provides that the more intense 
the activity and the greater the frequency of repetition, the more 
strongly is the habit fixed. These are well-known matters of fact 
established by psychological experiment and need no proof here. 

Any self-active experience consists of the realization of an 
ideal through some means of control, the latter of which may be 
sub-divided into objects of control and methods of controlling 
them. The objects are already in one's situation, they are the 
result of past experience and thus become the basis for further 
activity. The mental activity leading to the realization of the 
ideal is always concerned with the method of control, the ways 
in which these objects may be used to bring about the ideal 
situation. It is true that often other objects of control than 
those immediately present in consciousness must be sought, 
but here again the activity is concerned with method, with how 
to use what is present in order to gain what is needed. The 



Educational Implications 63 

vital flash of activity, the very exertion of will, the essence of 
self-activity, is manifested in the managing of these objects. 
In this process, new objects may be created in experience and 
become the basis of control for further activities, but, in every 
case, objects of control are data to begin with and the essence of 
active experience is in the control of them. Thus is new expe- 
rience realized. As the meaning of a thing is its relations, new 
relations discovered in the interest of control create new mean- 
ings. Now, when the experience which a study represents is 
gone through in the normal way, i. e. in the way in which it was 
first gone through when chosen as a valuable type of experience , 
the method of control creating new meanings is actively relived 
and burned into consciousness by a flash of will, thus taking on 
the nature of habit ; but when the ideal or purpose of the student 
becomes the remembering of this experience, then the method 
involved actively in the original experience, the essential part of 
it, becomes an object to be controlled by a new method which 
gets the flash of will, i.e. the method of using this object in order 
that it be remembered. The activity then leaves as habit not 
the essential experience for which the study stands, but the ex- 
perience of how to remember it, which, in this case, is of no 
essential value. No lesson involving new experience other than 
that of the memory process can be learned by pure memory 
work, for the objects to be remembered must be created by 
self -active experience involving judgment before they become 
objects of memory. Otherwise, memory effort connects symbols 
not by the new valuable meaning intended, but by some pre- 
viously experienced and remembered meaning, perhaps remotely 
analogical and without practical significance. There is always 
a danger of this when the symbol is given before the meaning is 
felt. If the new meaning in its fulness is present in consciousness, 
the study has been realized, and a more lasting memory habit 
involving it can be made by repeating the experience in all its 
essential phases. Memory work is usually compromised with 
inadequate experience of what is to be remembered, in which 
the student deals with symbols the full meaning of which he has 
not experienced, so that his energies are divided between a more 
or less vague realization of the study and memory effort. The 
energy used in memorizing is not only wasted, but is diverted 



64 The Learning Process 

from that use which would best cause the memory desired. Just 
as there is a difference between pleasure in desire and desire of 
pleasure 1 , so it is evident that there is a difference between the 
memory involved in an experience and the conscious pursuit 
of a memory experience; for, as in ethics against all those who 
make pleasure the end of action stands the paradox that to aim 
at pleasure is to miss it, that to find happiness one must seek 
something else, so against all who make memory an end in study 
stands the paradox that to aim at memory is to miss it, to store 
up rich experiences in the mind, one must seek something else. 
As has been said, the retention of an experience depends upon 
its intensity. The intensity of a conscious activity depends 
upon the degree to which the end in view is desired. This re- 
quires that the value of the end be felt, its immediate realization 
being obstructed. The ideal of memorizing an experience in 
connection with the study of it is usually not sufficiently attrac- 
tive to arouse a very high degree of activity, so that, if the real 
valuable ideal in the study itself is lost sight of in an effort to 
memorize, the amount of activity is decreased and the memory 
consequently weakened. To strengthen this effort, ideals 
extrinsic to the study, such as getting rewards, pleasing the teach- 
er, passing examinations, etc., are forced upon the student. 
Now, a study is selected as a valuable type of experience because 
of some intrinsic ideal, and not because in a schoolroom the 
memorizing of that study will please the teacher or enable the 
student to pass an examination. To the extent that extrinsic 
ideals are employed, to that extent the experience in the study 
is merged into a situation in which it has no value of adaptation 
to normal situations of life, and to that extent does it lose its 
value as a study. Indeed, if extrinsic motives to memorize were 
removed, effort to memorize would in most cases disappear 
and, where it did remain, it would be legitimate as a necessary 
part of the study and would not be something created extrinsic 
to the study by school conditions. Again, repetition more 
strongly fixes an idea in memory. But in repetition only the 
conscious activity is impressed by the law of habit; and, just as 
in shorthand the beginner may spell all the sounds of a word, 
but later through repetition can omit the vowels and even many 

iCf. Sidgwick: The Methods of Ethics, Book I, Chap. IV (Fifth Edition). 



Educational Implications 65 

of the consonants, so that a slight sign at once means the whole 
word ; so, in remembering anything, certain phases of it or feelings 
connected with it become symbolic of the whole, and through 
repetition these representative ideas become more and more 
symbolic, involving fewer and fewer characteristics of the objects. 
Therefore, the more an idea having a certain experience as its 
object is repeated for the sake of memory, the less is the typical 
experience realized. 

The second phase of the memory process is reproduction. 
While some experiences may be so deeply impressed upon the 
mind that they become conscious without apparently any 
associations, just as one may make some very habitual move- 
ment where there is no situation to call it forth, yet ordinarily 
ideas of objects remembered come to consciousness through 
association 1 , there must be some cue to bring them into con- 
sciousness. Activity adapts the individual to his environment, 
takes him from an unsatisfactory situation to a more satisfactory 
one through the control of means. The value of memory is 
that, when any such useful adaptation has once been worked 
out, the essential phases of the situation, when they recur, bring 
into consciousness both the ideal and the means of realizing it. 
One's whole life is an interrelated chain of purposive experiences 
in which what is an end in one experience is a means in another, 
so there is a running flash of will burning into consciousness 
experiences in organic relations, ideals as well as means of con- 
trol. To be of value, then, memory must associate things in 
useful relations so that a situation is a cue for further activity. 
Now, that which marks an experience to be of value for repeti- 
tion in typical form as a study is the original active relation, in 
which there is no conscious effort to remember, but to realize 
some other ideal. This relation of situation, ideal and means 
of control within the study constitutes the value of the study, 
and, to the extent that any other situation or any other ideal 
or any other means of control is in consciousness, to that extent 
is the study sacrificed for the sake of something foreign to it. 
If the original experience selected as a study involved no con- 
scious effort to memorize, then the repetition of that experience 
in the school should involve no conscious effort to memorize. 

I Cf. James: The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chap. XVI. 

5 



66 The Learning Process 

Furthermore, there is a tendency in psychological analysis to 
deal with only the intellectual phases; and, accordingly, in the 
analysis of memory, the emotional phases are apt to be neglected. 
Not only is there association within objective experience so 
that one phase will act as a cue to call up another, but there is 
also an association between objective experience and feeling. 
Indeed, a feeling of depression due to ill health is apt to be 
accompanied by gloomy ideas. The feeling that one has in a 
situation may call up objects that were formerly associated 
with a similar situation. Now, feeling is generated normally 
when the attainment of a greatly desired ideal is delayed, and, 
psychologically speaking, presumably results from the overflow 
of energy, normally for the purpose of control, into various 
organs of the body. Accordingly, to produce a valuable feeling 
in the study, the situation and ideal of the study must engross 
consciousness so that the realization of the ideal within the 
study is identified with the personal well being: if the ideal 
which does affect consciousness is not that of the study but 
rather the purpose of remembering, not only is a different feeling 
engendered from that which is vital to the study, but the in- 
trinsic matter of the study becomes from the self a thing apart 
rather than the self's very existence, so that the feeling phase 
of the intended experience is lost. 

The third phase revealed in the analysis of the memory process 
is that of recognition. From the intellectual standpoint, recog- 
nition is explained by the fact that through association any 
phase of experience finds its place in the continuity of the in- 
dividual's past experience. In connection with this, it is evi- 
dent that the experience of a study stands in more definite 
relation to the continuous life experience when the study is 
relived in a normal way and engrosses consciousness so as to 
form for the time being the whole of conscious experience, 
rather than when a remembering purpose engrosses conscious- 
ness and the content of the study exists as an objective meaning 
symbolized instead of being actually relived in time. Here 
again the emotional phase is worthy of consideration. Since 
memory is a habit, an experience is impressed upon conscious- 
ness just as it occurs. As has been said, when a desired ideal 
identified with one's personal well-being is realized through a 



Educational Implications 67 

process of control, there is an accompanying emotion. When 
the experience is reproduced in memory, this emotion is to a 
greater or less extent reproduced with the other phases of the 
experience, which makes in the remembered past a feeling of 
familiarity that is not present in a mere creation of fancy. 
Indeed, in extreme cases, a memory of harrowing experiences 
will quicken the heart -beats and affect the rate of breathing — 
evidences of emotion — when the recall of the same kind of 
experience objectively learned from the words of another would 
not have such an effect. Intellectual and emotional associations 
develop together: with new ideas recalled are new feelings that 
blend to make the feeling of recognition stronger, while this 
stronger feeling by association tends to recall other ideas. 

To sum up, the best conditions for retention, the creating of 
the strongest and most useful associations for reproduction and 
the nature of recognition demand that the ideal within the 
experience be made for the time being the student's own ideal 
and the logical process involved in the realization of it be made 
his active process, to the end that the study be normally relived, 
in which case the memory of it would result as a by-product. 
The study of spelling, which apparently depends most upon 
memory, may be chosen for illustration. The general principle 
of method (p. 59) is that the essentials of the situation in reac- 
tion to which the desired experience was originally brought 
about must be reproduced in the school. The normal use of 
spelling is in recording, for the sake of communicating to another 
or to the self at another time, a past experience in accordance 
with some desired end. The experience of spelling ordinarily 
arises when someone, in writing, senses the difference between 
the correct and incorrect spelling of a word to the degree of 
feeling uncertain in regard to the matter. Satisfaction may 
then be got by analysis of the word into its roots the spelling of 
which is known, use of the laws of memory reproduction in 
recalling past experiences of the word, the application of a rule 
previously experienced in a logical way, reference to some 
objective standard, or other means. Accordingly, there is a 
present situation involving uncertainty in regard to the spelling 
of a word which is being used in accordance with some desired 
end, an ideal situation which is subordinate to the main end 



68 The Learning Process 

desired and involves the satisfaction of certainty, and the means 
of control as indicated above. Now, the primary condition of 
the normal teaching of spelling as a valuable type of experience 
to be repeated is a consciousness on the part of the student of a 
tension in the present situation and the projection of an ideal 
as indicated. If this is not present, then he must be put under 
conditions in his reaction to which this consciousness will be 
produced, but these new and more or less foreign conditions 
should be the least possible to start the desired process, which, 
when well started, may continue without such assistance: their 
function in this respect is analogous to that of medicine in pro- 
ducing proper functioning of physical organs. Often teachers 
underscore misspelled words and sometimes even correct them. 
If the misspelled words are indicated to the student, the funda- 
mentally valuable ability to sense certainty and uncertainty in 
regard to the spelling of words is neglected and the basis for 
self -development in this direction is not strengthened as it 
should be. When the correction of words is made by the 
teacher, training in normal means of control also is neglected. 
It would be better merely to indicate that a certain number of 
words are misspelled. Then the student, either of his own 
initiative or through influence of the teacher, may separate the 
certain from the uncertain and the more certain from the less 
certain, and remove these tensions of uncertainty by further 
logical procedure, acquiring thereby those habits of judgment 
which are essential to the experience for which the study was 
selected. Thus would correct spelling be better retained, 
recalled and recognized. The essential process, that leading 
to certainty, would be retained. Since the essence of self- 
activity is in the realization of the method of control (p. 65) 
and since only this self-activity is retained through memory as a 
form of habit, whenever the situation of the misspelled word is 
experienced, the remembered process of control bridges to the 
correct spelling with its accompanying feeling of certainty. As 
this process becomes more habitual, the bridging is done more 
quickly until the one situation is merged into the other; and, 
when this occurs, the correct spelling is completely learned. 
Again, when the end in view is not some extrinsic reward, but 
the removal of a feeling of uncertainty in regard to the word in 



Educational Implications 69 

question, the ideal is intrinsic to the experience of the study and 
the interest is more centered in the active process of that ex- 
perience, both of which facts increase the intensity of the essen- 
tial experience desired and therefore increase the retention of it. 
When the spelling experience is repeated in this way, in so far 
as correct habit has been formed, it tends to become less and 
less conscious, so that consciousness is further occupied with 
those phases of the habit which are not properly fixed. Thus 
does the whole consciousness focus upon removing smaller and 
smaller tensions, intensifying the very activity which is most 
needed. When there is no further tension, when there is cer- 
tainty, repetition has done its work and retention is perfected. 
Reproduction, as has been said, is through association, which is 
merely the organic relation of various phases in the process of an 
activity. When the study is realized in the way suggested, 
this activity leads directly from the unsatisfactory spelling 
through a process of control to the corrected spelling with its 
intrinsic satisfaction. The associations, therefore, are made 
along the line which leads directly out of the difficulty to the 
desired goal, and, consequently, are useful associations, which 
would not be the case if they ran off on tangents to ends which 
are foreign to the study. In a spelling lesson or any other 
lesson, to the extent that there is given what activity would 
normally be called upon to work out, to that extent is the activ- 
ity of consciousness directed elsewhere, beyond the confines of 
the study where useless associations are built up. As has been 
indicated, feeling is due to a tension between a present and an 
ideal situation. Accordingly, when the study is repeated with- 
out extrinsic ends, the feeling is organically connected with the 
more or less prolonged process through which the ideal in the 
study is reached; but, when an extrinsic end, as reward for 
remembering a study, gives motive to the active experience, the 
feeling is centered elsewhere. Instead of arising from the 
process leading from the incorrect to the correct spelling, it is 
centered in the tension between the present situation and the 
reward for memorizing. As feelings, through association, have 
value in the process of reproduction, those feelings which arise 
from the tensions intrinsic in the study are the ones most advan- 
tageous to memory. Again, since recognition depends more or 



yo The Learning Process 

less upon the experience finding its place in the continuity of 
past associations, if the process leading from the incorrect to the 
correct spelling engrosses the whole consciousness for the time 
being, the experience stands in more definite relation to the 
continuous life experience than if consciousness were occupied 
to a greater or less extent with a memory purpose. Then, too, 
when the tension is between the correct and the incorrect spell- 
ing, the feeling of uncertainty growing into certainty is more 
intense and therefore better retained, so that, when the correct 
spelling is again met with, it is accompanied by a strong feeling 
of certainty, of familiarity with the correct spelling. Indeed, 
the development of this feeling is of greatest importance in the 
learning of spelling, for its presence marks the words that are 
known. One does not depend so much, in recognizing correct 
spelling of a word, upon placing it definitely in the continuity 
of past experience as upon that feeling of certainty which is an 
immediate accompaniment of the word and marks it as familiar. 
Indeed, when this stage has been reached, memory has done its 
perfect work, habit has been completely formed, feeling dis- 
appears to return only when needed in a tension, and what was 
once mediately remembered is now immediately perceived to be 
a fact. Finally, when memory is made only a by-product of the 
repetition of the intrinsic experience of spelling as a study, not 
only is the spelling better remembered, but there is developed 
that sensing of correctness and incorrectness of words and that 
method of control in correcting them which would naturally 
bring further improvement independently of the school. The 
medicine of school-room method thus effects a cure in making 
the spelling activity function properly and eventually is needed 
no longer. Implied in this discussion is the fact that training 
in spelling properly given involves training in penmanship, 
composition, meaning of words and in thinking. From memor- 
izing a poem to learning a geometry lesson, these general prin- 
ciples are applicable, whether in individual study or in class 
recitation. 

(2) The lack of interest due to the failure of the teacher to 
fully perform his function remains for consideration. Life 
independent of the school is throbbing with interest for normal 
people. If the school causes the repetition of the most valuable 



Educational Implications 71 

types of this experience, the work of the school also should be 
interesting. The nature of this phase of mental life must find 
its meaning in relation to the wider life process. In the typical 
illustration of the rise of conscious life (p. 43), when the child 
cannot carry out his habitual tendency to reach the apple, 
there is a tension out of which originates feeling, involved in 
desire with its appreciation of worth of the end or ideal of 
getting the apple, and thought as a means of control in realizing 
this end. A similar tension exists between any present and 
ideal situation. Now, interest is primarily emotional and 
therefore is concerned with the appreciation of worth, getting 
its vitality from the end which the individual is delayed in 
realizing, and manifests itself together with attention, its objec- 
tive counterpart, while the agent is in process of bringing about 
the realization. When this particular tension ceases, because 
the ideal is attained or because it is superseded by a tension 
between the present situation and some other ideal situation, 
the particular interest vanishes. That an emotion called forth 
by the appreciated worth of an ideal should attach itself to the 
means of control is not strange, for nothing is commoner than 
the transference of feeling to that which is associated with its 
primary cause. A mound of earth that otherwise would be 
regarded indifferently, if it marks the grave of a friend, itself 
affects one as though it were sacred. The warmth of feeling 
hidden in the concepts of home and country is a composite of 
the emotional phases of all experiences associated with them, 
constituting their meaning. In interest this association is a 
very organic one, for the end as product is not really separable 
from the controlled process out of which it comes. The general 
application of this to teaching is simple. For a study to be 
genuinely interesting, the intrinsic ideal of the study must be 
identified with the student's own well-being and the problems 
of control must be made his problems. Effort is sometimes con- 
sidered to be the opposite of interest, and, as opposing earlier 
interest, this is in a sense true, but there can be no effort without 
interest, for it is due to a conflict of interests. In the process 
of realizing a more or less remote ideal situation, other ideals 
become conscious, together with tendencies to actively bring 
about their realization, so that the way to overcome the digress- 



72 The Learning Process 

ing interests is to strengthen the remote ideal, which may be 
done by bringing into consciousness ideas of well-being that 
would come as a consequence of it. Conditions should be con- 
trolled as much as possible so as not to suggest conflicting ideals. 
The value of effort consists in the fact that its presence signifies 
that a habit is being formed of creating conditions which lead 
to the predominance of an original ideal, for the absence of 
effort may indicate that the individual is pursuing now this ideal 
and now that, as they have happened to come to consciousness, 
without accomplishing anything worth while. Aside from 
this, however, effort indicates a waste of energy, a conflict of 
activities rather than a direct realization of the original ideal. 
Greater freedom arising from control results when direct activi- 
ties involving no useless digressions are made habitual. Accord- 
ingly, a study as a typical experience provides no intrinsic con- 
ditions to cause effort, but these conditions spring from the 
other experience of the student brought into consciousness 
together with the study, and may be merely the purpose of con- 
tinuing a feeling of repose rather than engaging in aggressive 
activity. Effort is a friction, greater in some individuals than 
in others, which indicates that one is moving towards the goal 
selected despite opposing forces; but, if he can go forward 
without friction, so much the better. If the school reproduces 
the variety of typical experiences it should, the ordinary possible 
frictions in the individual's activity will be corrected; if they 
do not come, there is no use for them. The goal of effort is to 
prevent useless digressive activities and thus to destroy itself. 
In humanistic studies, literature for instance, there must be 
conflicting ideals presented, for value is a relation and the value 
of ideals are brought out by contrast with others, but here there 
is no place for effort, since, as in play, the means of control are 
neglected, so that the interest quickly changes from one ideal 
to another, their values being immediately appreciated. Inter- 
est itself is of no value unless it is conditioned by valuable ends. 
Since the function of interest is to lead to better states of well- 
being, natural selection in the evolutionary process has brought 
it about that what is active, i. e. changing or new in one's situa- 
tion, since it is liable to affect his well-being, is interesting, but 
only temporarily so, unless it appears to be of value in relation 



Educational Implications 73 

to one's purposes. These temporary interests may be stimu- 
lated in the school room, but they alone do not condition gen- 
uine study; for this a permanent interest is needed, one called 
forth not by novelty but by appreciated value. When an 
attempt is made to treat knowledge as something to be got into 
the memory rather than experiences to be lived, the interest 
conditioned is inferior in kind and ordinarily in degree. When 
a study is genuinely experienced, the interest is intrinsic and is 
conditioned by the ideal within the study being identified with 
the well-being of the student; when memory is consciously 
considered, the interest is conditioned by some ideal extrinsic 
to the study being identified with the well-being of the student. 
Interest gets its value from the process including the ideal which 
conditions it; and, if intrinsic, it indicates activity through the 
process which leads to the realization of the ideal within the 
valuable selected type of experience, or study, as a product. 
This activity marks the experiencing of the study in the fullest 
way; for the product is conditioned only through the complete 
realization of the process, which, for the time being, occupies 
the whole activity of the individual and becomes a vital part of 
his life process. The various phases or facts of the study are 
then known in the best way, for a thing is a focus point of rela- 
tions; and, in such an experience, the facts are experienced in 
their complete normal relation in the process. When to remem- 
ber a study is the conscious aim, the study is objectified, becom- 
ing from the self a thing apart rather than its own existence, 
and, accordingly, the phases, or facts, of the study exist as the 
objective and more or less indefinite meaning of symbolizing 
ideas which are to be remembered. This is conspicuously evi- 
dent in learning by rote and has led to verbatim learning being 
put under the ban, but ideas are quite as symbolic in nature as 
words, for one phase of the meaning, and that often an unim- 
portant one, vaguely indicates the whole, a truth which is not 
quite so patent and consequently overlooked. In a conscious 
effort to remember, the interest is not centered in the meaning 
of the ideas, but in the reward of remembering, and indicates an 
active process in which the ideas referring to the study are 
objects of control in securing this reward. Now, the facts of the 
study find their complete genuine relations, their true meaning, 



74 The Learning Process 

in the study, and become useful knowledge only when their 
product is experienced as an ideal growing out of them, when 
they assume their normal relations in the active process. When 
the interest makes memorizing a conscious effort, the ideas 
referring to these facts are related in more or less mechanical 
way in associations which would most easily fix them in memory. 
Now, it is always true that to remember, the truth must have 
been lived in a normal way without effort to memorize: other- 
wise, the ideas which are instruments in memory would have no 
meaning. When an effort is made to remember symbolic ideas, 
they are related according as their meaning has been experienced 
in former activities, these associations, which may be of practi- 
cally no value, being recalled. Mechanical associations in 
memory, a factual knowledge, means that the facts of the study 
are related according to some other experiences, and, since the 
meaning of a fact is its relations, the new meaning, which gives 
the study its value, is missed. This is especially noticeable in 
what is called "cramming". However intense an extrinsic 
interest may be, it marks an inferior experience, because the 
ideas symbolizing facts of the study are to a greater or less 
degree put into relations which are not those in which they 
exist in the study, but which nevertheless lead to the extrinsic 
end sought. Since these facts as facts of the study are known 
only when their true relations within the study are experienced, 
the extrinsic interest, however strong it may be, and however 
good the memory of facts may appear, indicates an activity 
that has run aside from that which would produce the knowledge 
intended by the study. To the degree that school life repeats 
valuable types of experience selected from those of society at 
large, the school conditions experiences identified with the 
highest well-being of the individual and therefore intrinsically 
interesting. 

For the selection of a curriculum, the culture epoch theory 
offers the hypothesis that the interests of the individual in their 
development correspond to the interests of the race in its suc- 
cessive stages of development. The social environment of the 
present time, to which the new-born individual is to be adjusted, 
is not a creation independent of his nature, but the highest 
expressions of his nature that have been experienced. By a 



Educational Implications 75 

vicarious process, each generation, as a result of numberless 
endeavors, most of which have been useless, has come upon some 
valuable new experiences which have been added to the fund 
it has received through education as an inheritance from pre- 
ceding generations. Any experience which gives ideals felt to 
be more satisfactory than those previously experienced or 
means of control which give greater freedom is marked for 
preservation in the social environment. In this way nature 
becomes the greatest experimental psychologist, discovering and 
recording those activities which the human mind has found to 
be the most satisfactory expressions of itself. When old activi- 
ties are no longer repeated, it is because a better expression of 
human nature has been found. It is true that many older and 
less valuable forms of experience are retained in various social 
classes that do not represent the highest advancement of their 
times. Many enjoy crudities in art which represent the attain- 
ment of a more or less primitive people, and, in ethics, criminals 
are those who practice forms of active expression which con- 
form to ethical standards at one time or another the highest in 
the race, but now superseded by higher ones. The culture 
epoch theory is based upon analogy with the recapitulation 
theory, which holds that individual embryonic development 
recapitulates the phylogenetic series out of which it has evolved, 
a theory which was made in the service of interpreting the past 
in the light of the present, rather than the present in the light of 
the past. Several important phases in which the analogy is at 
fault should be considered, (a) The spiritual development of 
the race has been far more rapid than its physical development, 
because tools can be invented more quickly than physical 
organs evolved for accomplishing the same results, and the 
imaginary construction of ideals reveals higher worths much 
more rapidly than the organism could have blundered upon 
them. The appearance of mind in the evolutionary process 
does not eliminate chance variation: since thought is dramatic 
acting in imagination without the time, effort and physical 
results which physical activity brings, it greatly multiplies the 
number of variations and therefore the number of successful 
ones. This rapidity of social development would seem to 
preclude naturally selected physical changes which are the basis 



j6 The Learning Process 

of explanation of inherited tendencies, out of which interests 
would grow, (b) While physical characteristics can be trans- 
mitted only through direct physical inheritance, new mental 
activities can be transmitted through a social copy to those who 
coexist with the one who first experienced them. This indicates 
that the new experiences are potentially in other individuals 
to be brought to realization by proper conditions; and, if they 
are expressions of the nature of these individuals, they would be 
interesting to them, (c) While past experiences which form a 
part of present social life can be repeated, to realize the essential 
experiences of a more primitive people whose ideas have been 
outgrown is incompatible with the present situations in which 
the child is placed. The ideal gets its meaning, its value, and 
consequently its interest, in relation to the present situation 
with which it is contrasted. To the well-kept child of to-day, 
tent -making and hunting do not get their interest because of 
protection from cold and satisfaction of hunger, that which made 
them interesting to the savage. Again, the literature of a primi- 
tive people is an expression of idealized forms of their expe- 
riences rather than the common daily life of the tribe. The child 
may be interested in it just as he may be interested in a colored 
cartoon without knowing what it symbolizes. There is one 
symbolization with two interests rather than the repetition of 
an earlier interest. Such studies are inclined to become the 
symbolization, through that which is connected with the lives 
of earlier peoples, of worths which are appreciated only in 
modern civilization. Finally, the literary expression of a 
primitive people has reference to the experience of adults and 
finds much of its interest because of adolescent instincts, which 
do not appear in the nature of the young child. 

The tensions in the experience of any individual develop out 
of the situations in which he is placed, and these situations are 
determined, in a large measure, by his social environment, 
which he has in common with others and which changes with 
each succeeding generation. Matter, that which is in a measure 
common in social experience, is constantly changing in form so 
as to be the bearer of new social purposes, and it is this thought 
which vitalizes the present material world with which his ad- 
justment must be made. The purpose of education is to pro- 



Educational Implications jj 

mote the adjustment of the child to his present environment, to 
make more harmonious his experience of those situations which 
he has in common with others. He meets situations different 
from those in more primitive society and consequently his ten- 
sions are different. Not because of its interest alone, but be- 
cause of its usefulness in promoting this adjustment, does a 
study get its value. This would mark many of the ancient 
superstitions as useless in present education, because they have 
been superseded by more satisfactory ideas which are quite as 
easily comprehended. The culture epoch theory, indeed, has 
some basis in truth in that the child must go from the simple to 
the complex, and more primitive conceptions are frequently 
simpler; but, in every case, the child in relation to his present 
situation is the determining factor of the advance and not the 
length or prominence of any cultural stages in the development 
of the race. Primitive life suggests many useful activities so 
simple that a child can do them — and in the bringing forward of 
such activities is the greatest value of the work of the culture 
epoch advocates — , but his satisfaction is in doing something 
rather than in the ideals which gave motives to earlier peoples; 
and, consequently, his actions have a different meaning to him. 
He can make a tent or weave by hand when he cannot build a 
house or use complicated machinery, and out of this come ele- 
mentary ideas as a basis for more complex activities, but his 
interest is in the situation of doing something rather than in the 
usefulness of the product. He can take quite as much interest 
in playing motorman or teacher as he can in imitating an Indian 
medicine man or a Greek warrior. There are many short cuts 
in the formation of habits which better adjust him to the present; 
and, in such cases, there is a waste of energy in traversing the 
tortuous paths marked by the race in its gropings. The ex- 
perience of the past is made vicarious when later generations 
avoid its round-about paths as well as those which lead to no 
desirable end. 

Since the purpose of the school is not to create situations 
peculiarly its own, but to organize and develop the wider life of 
responsibility, life with its interests as experienced by the child 
without the school should vitalize the activities of the school. 
Reality as it differentiates in experience is an organic unity, so 



78 The Learning Process 

that every phase of experience gets its full meaning only in the 
light of all the rest. Consequently, the studies of the school are 
a fuller expression of that very experience which the child has 
realized throughout his life. An ideal is not an ideal for an 
individual unless it is identified with his own well-being, and, 
therefore, the ideal in a study must be vitally connected with 
the pupil's living interests. His whole situation, in any in- 
stance, is the product of his total experience, including his life 
without the school as well as that within it. If, in this situation, 
the tensions conditioned by the teacher to bring about an 
experiencing of the study are extrinsic rewards and punishments 
peculiar to the school and having no value beyond it, the rela- 
tions established between the child's previous experience and 
the ideal of the study are liable to have but little significance for 
the child's wider life of responsibility, in the interest of which 
the school exists. Since the interests without the school are 
largely intrinsic, the activities involving them are felt to be 
more closely identified with the life of the child to a degree that 
school studies with their extrinsic interests may seem to be 
something from his life apart. This partial dualism perhaps 
can never be wholly removed, but it should be minimized as 
much as possible. By its fruits in life as a whole is the school 
to be judged, and, if any activity belongs only to school situa- 
tions and is no longer of use when a child has finished his school 
education, in the economy of nature whereby only that which 
is permanently useful remains, this school activity is fortu- 
nately forgotten. To measure the efficiency of the school in the 
light of this principle would certainly make startling revelations 
of its inadequacy in many instances as it is at present adminis- 
tered. When such inadequacy prevails, the pupil, having 
failed of guidance in the development of his life of responsibility, 
ceases to progress as he should, settles down in a narrow circle 
of habits forced upon him by his immediate environment and 
lives in the process of removing small tensions in his immediate 
surroundings rather than aggressively adjusting himself to a 
spiritual environment as wide as the experience of the race. 
This spiritual environment is potentially involved in whatever 
little experience he may have, and, in the light of it, the other- 
wise unimportant daily acts get their highest significance and 



Educational Implications 79 

are raised above the plane of drudgery, which results from work 
when its higher ideal significance is not appreciated. Indeed, 
the only ultimate wealth or poverty is wealth or poverty in the 
realization of this richer experience. Since habits become 
unconscious, conscious life itself loses much of its intensity when 
only small new adjustments are being made, for the intensity of 
conscious life depends upon its progressive adjustments. Mod- 
ern machinery and division of labor by simplifying adjustments 
has no small influence in deadening experience, when the school 
has not revealed a wider experience and given the individual a 
genuine and vigorous start in its realization. Indeed, not only 
should the school be more closely related to the home so that 
teachers may know more of the experience of their pupils, but 
it should become more the center of community life as a com- 
stant source of opportunity, inspiration and direction to those 
who have passed the so-called school age without having become 
independently successful in directing themselves to their highest 
realization. 

At first, the pupil is capable of very little self direction. 
Simple forms of manual training are of special value here; for 
such tensions in the material environment, the bearer of the 
social purpose, which is in a sense common to both pupil and 
teacher, are easily made and understood. While manual train- 
ing is sometimes considered to have its chief value in mtiscular 
coordination, it may become a most valuable medium for the 
normal development of knowledge through the creation of 
desired ends, ideas of more satisfactory adjustments, and the 
realization of logical processes in the interest of control, which 
constitutes formal discipline. The whole self -active process is 
here involved in a valuable way. Out of the present situation 
grows an ideal situation which, conceived in imagination, is felt 
by the pupil to be more satisfactory; a logical process, which, in 
seeking to remove the tension and secure harmony, draws upon 
other experience, builds hypothetical bridges to the desired 
situation and tries them at first in imagination ; a final testing of 
the chosen hypotheses in actually realizing what is desired, 
whereby the hypotheses become facts. Judgments are the 
atoms out of which the world is built, and, in such a process, the 
pupil is in a very real sense creating his world — and peopling it, 



80 The Learning Process 

too, through his power to eject his experience into his ideas of 
other persons. Too much imitation perverts the process so as 
to seriously affect its value. Imitation enables one to take 
advantage of the product of another's experience without going 
through with the complete process. For objective effects, it is 
very valuable in giving both ideals and means of control, and 
determines most of our lives, but education can develop genuine 
knowledge only through the development of the process. As 
the appreciation of ideals is immediate, involving no process 
which can be objectified and analyzed, there is no opportunity 
for formal training here. The appreciation does not depend 
upon how the ideal is got, but upon its value. If a process is 
gone through with in getting the ideals, that is a process of con- 
trol and not of appreciation; and, on the formal side, all proc- 
esses of control are alike. To the extent that imitation con- 
trols manual training work, to that extent a factual knowledge 
corresponding to the learning of definitions from a book is got 
at the expense of the pupil's learning how to direct his own activi- 
ties. Manual training is more valuable for beginners than book 
work, because a poverty of experience has not enriched 
the meanings of book symbols sufficiently to make them vital 
realities in the pupil's situation. Indeed, for this very reason, 
it is often true in secondary school work that boys and girls who 
are indifferent to mere book study manifest a lively interest in 
manual training to a degree that when these direct physical 
situations are connected with the book symbols, giving them a 
vital meaning, a vigorous interest may be developed in the 
latter. As the meaning of everything in the world involves the 
meaning of everything else, this interest. may gradually be led 
to extend to reading matter which at first glimpse would seem 
to be wholly removed from the original source of interest. An 
attempt to force pupils to study books in which no interest is 
felt by them is apt to make a feeling of aversion an habitual 
attitude of mind in relation to books and school work generally 
to a degree that their student interests may be unnecessarily 
destroyed. The material handled in manual training is as truly 
symbolic as the words of the book, for the meaning of the thing 
is its relations, which are symbolized by what is sensed, so that 
every new relation discovered enriches the meaning of the latter. 



Educational Implications 81 

Accordingly, daily activity with this material has given it very 
rich meanings that have become of vital interest through asso- 
ciations with the realization of ideals, with the better adjustment 
and consequent well-being of the self. Because of the fuller 
realization of this kind of experience in the life of the pupil, 
since the matter involved bears for him a richer content of social 
purpose, or meaning, it becomes a better medium for mutual 
understanding between pupil and teacher, as a consequence of 
which the teacher can make tensions more valuable for the pupil. 
Because of this better mutual understanding of the symbolic 
material, the pupil's ideals become clearer, his situations more 
vivid, his tensions more specific, his interests keener, his logical 
processes more definite and the testing of conclusions more 
accurate. Such conditions are of greatest value in developing 
the self-active process. There is a tendency to magnify the 
contrast between manual work and book work even to the point 
of dualism, where the so-called material and spiritual environ- 
ments are considered to be fundamentally different. Analysis 
seems to indicate that no such dualism exists. A percept is a 
blur of sensation definitely distinguished and given a meaning 
by remembered past experiences with which it is associated. 
From habituation, the memory process immediately presents 
these past experiences so that they seem to be known in the 
sensation itself. Just as a composite photograph makes vivid 
the common and obscures variation, so here the strongly im- 
pressed composite out of many experiences is felt to be the thing 
directly perceived. Where the recall is not immediate or where 
a particular past experience comes clearly to mind, the failure to 
completely merge into the percept marks something remembered. 
Now, in words both spoken and written, the sense symbol of the 
so-called material experience has substituted for it the sense 
symbol of the word with which the relations involved in the 
"thing" are associated by memory. In so far as the associa- 
tions exist, they are as valid in one case as in the other, the 
difference being that in the one case nature furnishes the symbol 
along with the experience, while in the other an arbitrary symbol 
is chosen, which may be copied after the natural symbol as in 
picture writing or the sound of a word. As various sensations, 
usually those of sight, hearing or touch, may separately sym- 
6 



&2 The Learning Process 

bolize the same thing, so a word may be seen or heard or, as in 
the case of raised print for the blind, felt, each sensation meaning 
the same thing. There is this difference, however; one or more 
of the natural sense symbols is always present with the expe- 
rience involving the "thing" and seldom or never without it, 
while of the various sensations of the arbitrary word symbol 
none may be present with the experience and all are usually 
used without it, so that, according to the law of habit, the asso- 
ciation in the instance of the natural symbol becomes stronger 
than in the instance of the arbitrary one. If what is at first the 
natural symbol of a "thing" occurs without the experience 
associated with it, an illusion results. This may lead to a 
weakening of some associations whereby the symbol comes to 
stand for only that part of the original experience with which 
it always occurs. Indeed, this indicates how separate "things" 
are formed, (cf. pp. 45 ff.) It seems to be evident on intro- 
spection that there can be no idea without its sensation symbol, 
even though the sensation be due only to muscular tensions of 
the organs of speech when words are thought, or to still simpler 
muscular feelings in attention. The reason why an arbitrary 
symbol is used in preference to producing a natural one is that it 
can be easily created at will and presents the element of past 
experience in the meaning of the thing without the direct rela- 
tion of the thing to the will as a dynamic factor in the environ- 
ment and the consequences arising therefrom. Instead of there 
being a material adjustment and then a spiritual adjustment, 
every material adjustment has value and meaning only to the 
degree that it is spiritualized. Words generally are the most 
spiritualized phases of the so-called material environment and 
the adjustment to, or, in other words, the realization of their 
meaning is ultimately of the same practical consequence as any 
adjustment. The most theoretical studies of science, philosophy 
and religion have arisen from practical needs in the interest of 
control and are valuable to the degree that the understanding 
of them makes a better adjustment possible. A misunderstand- 
ing is apt to occur by looking upon the object of the percept as 
something separate and apart from the self to which the self 
must be adjusted, rather than as essentially a meaning which 
has grown out of the experience of the self. The sensation 



Educational Implications 83 

symbol is a terminal objective aspect of experience in relation 
to the subjective aspect, but the adjustment is an adjustment 
not to a symbol but to a meaning, and this meaning is always 
spiritual. Matter exists for one only in the degree that it has 
meaning. The same form characterizes all experience, which 
consists of a present situation symbolically represented and 
existing for the individual only in so far as it has meaning, a 
more or less definite idea symbolically represented of a situation 
in which the adjustment is more harmonious, and the discovery 
and use of a means of control to realize this ideal. The student 
of ethics and the farmer, in accordance with the same formal 
process, both employ "material" symbols through the compre- 
hension of the meaning of which they secure better adjustments, 
in both cases the process being divided into the securing of 
minor adjustments which must be made in the realization of the 
more remote ones, but the process of realizing each of the minor 
adjustments is formally the same as the whole process involving 
the widest and most remote adjustment. There is no dualism 
between ethical and scientific activity; for every adjustment 
involves both, one setting the worth of the end and the other 
the means of control for realizing it: there is a science in every 
ethical activity and an ethics in every scientific activity. By 
the use of arbitrary symbols as in language, situations can be 
built at will in the imagination. This is of great importance in 
learning, because it makes valuable types of racial experience 
possible which would not otherwise come into the life of the 
pupil; and, furthermore, it makes thinking possible. Thought 
is a bridge built in the imagination to the ideal, its material 
being the ideas of things as factors of control. If a dog or a cat 
put into a box is dissatisfied with its confinement, it will act in 
all sorts of ways, each act more or less seriously affecting the 
self, until by chance some movement may release it; this move- 
ment giving satisfaction tends to be associated thereafter with 
the situation "being in a box". A man confined in a prison 
and wishing to escape will merely imagine various acts and their 
consequences, his imagination being guided through association 
by generalizations and analogies until some act is found which 
in imagination seems to bring the desired situation as its con- 
sequence. This act is then realized. The man thus saves his 



84 The Learning Process 

energy by realizing only the act most likely to prove successful; 
and, moreover, his imaginary acts, in the light of previous 
experiences, are limited to those more likely to be successful, 
for such are suggested by elements in the present situation 
which have also been elements in other situations to which he 
has learned the satisfactory responses. When his conclusions 
are not verified by the act, it is because he has taken a limited 
point of view, omitting some essential phases of the situation, 
or has imagined phases present which did not exist. 

Reality is a differentiating unity. Words are arbitrary 
symbols in the interest of this differentiation, but everywhere 
the differentiation is one of meaning, whether the symbols be 
natural or arbitrary. A book is a part of the symbolic environ- 
ment, which, under proper conditions, will bring about new 
differentiations in the experience of the pupil. What these 
proper conditions are should be the object of further analysis. 
Since the book learning process is essentially the same as the 
manual learning process, the latter may guide in the analysis of 
the former. The first essential in both is that the symbol must 
have some particular meaning that is significant in the new type 
of experience which the pupil is to get; in other words, the sym- 
bols are valuable only to the degree that they bear particular 
meanings. A symbol must have some meaning, else it cannot 
be in consciousness, but it may have a variety of meanings. 
The blur of bright color of a gold watch may mean to the child 
only something that gives a pleasant sensation and is to be 
reached for; to the machinist, a mechanism of springs and 
wheels ; to the day laborer, the indicator of his hours of toil and 
rest; to the astronomer, his whole theory of the universe. This 
truth is elaborated in the doctrine of apperception. Since the 
words of a book are arbitrarily chosen, the greatest variation in 
meaning is possible. Too often to pupils, even in secondary 
schools, do ma.n}r of the words of a book signify only certain 
sounds to be uttered or certain tensions of the vocal organs to be 
made; and, when more than this, they often fall far short of 
giving the meanings valuable in the type of experience which 
the book is intended to condition. If nature is the best psy- 
chologist, the method which nature uses to connect symbols and 
meanings should be taken advantage of in the use of arbitrary 



Educational Implications 85 

symbols. The natural symbol occurs with the experience 
of its meanings; indeed, the symbol is differentiated with the 
meaning and both develop together in accordance with the laws 
of habit formation: thus it is that in a percept the two are so 
intimately related that the meaning apparently is directly seen 
in the symbol. Since art can only approximate nature by 
following its laws, the meaning of arbitrary symbols is less 
vivid than that of the natural ones. If the printed words 
"table", "hat" and "Charles" are pinned respectively on a 
table, a hat, and a boy with the name indicated, and the teacher 
prints on the board, "Charles put the hat on the table," having 
the boy perform the action when he discovers the meaning of the 
sentence, the method will correspond in some essential features 
with that of nature, especially if the activity involved is of vital 
interest to the pupil; i.e. identified in some way with his own 
satisfaction or well-being. 1 The whole philosophy of the success- 
ful teaching of language is involved in the development of sym- 
bol and meaning in the percept; and, while the result is always 
the final test of any method, the analysis of the percept is not 
only suggestive, but gives a criterion by which invented ways 
of teaching such matter may be judged. Since the concept, 
judgment and reasoning begin and end in a growing perception, 
the complete analysis of the percept involves the whole intellect- 
ual process and consequently the theory of knowledge. The 
illustration given above in regard to the teaching of reading 
points only to one of the most obvious principles, that of associa- 
tion. As the simpler experiences of such lessons grow into more 
complex, the same principle holds good; the meaning involved 
must be experienced in connection with the symbol. In the 
teaching of reading, the meaning is too often sacrificed for the 
less valuable artificialities of tone and inflection, thus making 
the less valuable associations the strong ones. The vocal ex- 
pression should be developed in connection with the meaning 
rather than with printed words and punctuation points. Vocal 
expression finds its essential value in being the symbol of mean- 
ings and not the meaning of symbols. The teacher's work 
then, in a very important sense, is the translating of symbols 

iThe fact that natural symbols are grasped first as wholes and then differentiated, or 
analyzed, only in the realization of new purposes, has important implications opposed to 
the so-called "logical" methods of teaching. In learning to read or write, for instance, 
the pupil should begin with whole words rather than with syllables or letters. 



86 The Learning Process 

into meanings and connecting with symbols the new meanings 
developed. Since the schools of to-day generally are overridden 
by symbolism, though not so much as formerly, this function 
of the teacher should be emphasized more than it is, from the 
first simple tasks of manual training to the most abstract think- 
ing; for only in this way can a vocabulary be built up in which 
the symbolic words have vivid definite meanings and thus serve 
the ptirpose for which the institution of language came into 
existence. 

A book is a symbolic record of meaning which someone has 
experienced and judged worthy to be perpetuated. In the study 
of a book, two processes must be distinguished, the process of the 
experience recorded in the book and the process of the pupil in 
re-experiencing this. The ideals in humanistic literature are 
appreciated immediately when the reader's previous experience 
enables him to understand it at all, and, consequently, are the 
fountain of their own interest. In the pupil's process, the 
humanistic book, however prominent its ideals, must always be 
regarded as a means of control in relation to some purpose in his 
own life, else he would not undertake to read it; but this pur- 
pose need not be very strong or the relation of the book to it very 
clearly defined. His end to which the book is subservient may 
be so general as to find pleasure or culture. When he once 
begins to read, the ideals of the book take possession of him; 
for, as in the case of the motives cited, humanistic studies require 
that ulterior purposes be forgotten and realized only through 
aiming at something else, the ideal in the study. Indeed, it is 
this absence in consciousness of adjustment beyond itself that 
gives a certain satisfaction to art. In teaching such literature, 
the effort of the teacher is to direct the pupil in building syn- 
thetically out of his past experience the meaning of the ideals 
presented in the book. While no absolute statement can be 
made, since the distinctions are of greater or less rather than of 
what is and is not, the experience recorded in the beok and the 
student's experience as he reads it should give identical sources 
of interest so that the pupil need not be pointed to something 
beyond. In the degree that some end beyond is made promi- 
nent is the appreciation of the book interfered with. This may 
in part account for the fact that often the most dust-covered 



Educational Implications 87 

books in an individual's library are those he read in "literature" 
courses in his former school days. Contrasted with the hu- 
manistic, the scientific aspect of a book is not an end in expe- 
rience, but a means in relation to an end; and, accordingly, when 
scientific books are devoted to the control aspect without them- 
selves giving ideals to vitalize the control process, the teacher 
should closely relate the thought of the book to the purpose of 
the pupil so as to give it vital significance. The importance of 
this can be seen in life without the school, where the book of 
science is not consulted, except when one desires to make a cake, 
repair an electric bell, carpet a room, vote on a political issue, 
or control his activity in some other way in accordance with a 
purpose which was formed before the book was selected. There 
is a self realization, a satisfaction, and consequent interest in the 
activity of acquiring knowledge, and this alone may be the goal 
of the scientist, but his problems arise primarily out of other 
human needs and gain their significance in the light of a social 
ideal to the realization of which this knowledge is a means. 
The mere knowing ideal lives upon the problems of a wider life 
and dies without them. Everyone has many problems which 
he has been unable to solve and the art of selecting reading 
matter of the scientific sort is to choose under the guidance of 
titles and indices of books those volumes or parts of volumes 
which promise to solve the problems already vital. When no 
problems in some work of science to be studied are vital to the 
pupil, the teacher should bring into the consciousness of the 
pupil ideals, vividly felt by the latter to be identified with his 
own well-being, the realization of which condition these prob- 
lems. Thus is genuine interest developed through motivation. 
Science, furthermore, is realized through an intellectual process, 
some of the leading principles of which have already been 
pointed out. The process of control has a main problem which 
is analyzed into smaller ones that individually, for the time 
being, become the objects of study and the solution of these give 
the solution of the main problem. The finer the differentiation 
of problems, if the view-point be sufficiently wide, the more 
accurate is the solution, as it involves less opinion and more fact, 
until problems are reached the solutions of which have already 
become facts. In a book the scientific writer recounts only the 



88 The Learning Process 

essential part of his experience in solving a problem, in an organ- 
ized way, so that the subordinate problems are indicated in 
chapters and paragraphs. One cannot intelligently read a 
scientific book unless he has some idea of the problem it is to 
solve and realizes that problem to be in some degree vital in the 
realization of his own ideals: then he must understand the 
subordinate problems into which the main one is divided. Thus 
is he directed to a fuller understanding of the significance of the 
thoughts of the book so as to appreciate their relative importance. 
A book which claims to be science and cannot be analyzed in this 
way is not the complete record of any scientific experience, but 
factual, which means that elements of control value involved in 
various problems are given without reference to any particular 
problem. Lack of organization here is lack of relation to a 
particular problem and means that a very essential part of a 
scientific experience is neglected. An enormous amount of 
time and energy is wasted in school where "so many pages are 
assigned in advance" without this perspective, as the pupil, in 
consequence, regards a fact as a fact, often dwells upon those 
which are of little significance and gives insufficient attention to 
those which are of greatest importance. Again, there can be 
much economy in reading by skipping those subordinate prob- 
lems the solution of which the reader understands and centering 
attention upon those which he has not yet solved. At the 
beginning, the pupil needs direction in how to study a book, and 
the first step in supplying this need is in the assignment of 
lessons. Instead of having assigned a certain number of pages 
to be read and the facts given thereon to be memorized, the 
pupil should, at the beginning with the assistance of the teacher, 
and, later on when the formal habit has been established, of his 
own initiative, get an idea of the general problem of the book 
and the minor problems into which it is divided. Then, in the 
solution of the main problem, each lesson has its own little 
hierarchy of problems, which should be appreciated. Control 
is through the solution of problems and a problem must be appre- 
ciated before its solution is attempted, else the pupil works to no 
intrinsic purpose in the study. Not only the method of study- 
ing a book, but also the method of the recitation should be 
guided by the general principles here presented, for a recitation 



Educational Implications 89 

is only a study under the supervision of the teacher. It is 
desirable, as the pupil advances, to make accessible a wider 
variety of recorded experience by means of a library. Thus 
can problems more closely identified with his personal interests 
be dealt with and he can learn how to bring the experience of the 
race more fully into the realization of his own particular pur- 
poses. While at first book and page may be cited with advan- 
tage by the teacher, the pupil should gradually acquire that 
formal process of investigation which will make him independent 
in finding the information he desires, and thus self-directive in 
his activity. Useless mechanical difficulties in library work 
should be reduced to a minimum. A fault of teaching, which 
becomes conspicuous in such work, is a failure to have the pupil 
organize the results of his reading. In the first place, the read- 
ing should be for the purpose of solving some problem and this 
purpose should be a basis of selection in reading. No book may 
give a solution of the main problem of the pupil; but, when a 
division has been made into subordinate problems, the answers 
to these may be found. A mere fact, which has been stated 
(p. 48) to be an hypothesis which works, is, accordingly, the 
solution of some particular problem, which may be made an 
element of control in the solution of a larger problem. One's 
own problem, then, may be solved by reading the experience of 
others in the solution of different problems which, however, 
have some subordinate elements in common with his own. To 
pick out a number of facts without relation to some purpose of 
one's own is analogous to heaping up a pile of window frames, 
doors, bricks and other elements taken from various houses. 
They are mere debris unless again built into some useful struc- 
ture. A fact as a fact is potentially valuable, for it may some- 
time be used; but, until it is used in the realization of some pur- 
pose, it has no real value. When library work is merely factual, 
it fails to develop those formal habits of purposive relationing 
which alone make reading of greatest value, for thus do facts 
become an essential part of the life of the reader. Control of 
experience, in the interest of which science has developed, 
requires constructiveness. This factor, which is the essence of 
self-direction in activity, is necessary to the efficiency of the 
pupil and yet is often neglected. The results of reading should 



90 The Learning Process 

be worked out more artistically — indeed, more artistic work is 
needed in all activities of the school — and by artistic work is 
meant the copying of nature's process of learning by a close 
organization of material in the interest of some purpose with the 
elimination of all that is useless. Since meanings are relations, 
only thus can they be accurately conceived. In this age of 
hasty work, too many books are poor models of clean-cut, clear 
relationing. They are factual in giving material foreign to the 
purpose of the book and in failing to reveal those vital relation- 
ships in the logical process of development which prevent its 
elements from becoming disintegrated into mere facts. The 
critical organization of such books is good training for advanced 
students, but the books serve as poor studies and condition 
faulty mental habits in the less mature pupil. In training a 
colt for speed, he should be required to do his best for his dis- 
tance: for the same formal reason, a pupil, to develop the high- 
est mental efficiency, should form the habit of doing his best, of 
making his work the most artistic within the bounds of those 
limited purposes which his previous experience determines. 
Quality rather than quantity of work should be emphasized, 
and here, if anywhere, does the principle hold that if the little 
things are attended to, the great things will take care of them- 
selves. Crude unfinished results in work, without clear and 
definite organization, may seem to the teacher who prizes factual 
knowledge to be a saving of time, but it does so at the expense 
of efficiency in thinking and consequently in the development of 
genuine knowledge. The ability to see a problem clearly and 
to use in controlling its solution only those elements which are 
vital to it is a rare virtue in every department of life and a virtue 
which it is the duty of the school to develop. So long as the 
school imposes such artificial conditions that the main purpose 
of the pupils is to pass, whether in recitation or more formal way, 
examinations that require factual memory rather than efficient 
thinking, so long will it develop the knowledge that has value 
in realizing this inferior purpose which the school has made vital 
to the pupil, but, so far as more valuable purposes are concerned, 
disintegrates into relatively useless facts and a consequent 
failure to know those vital meanings which are signified by the 
symbols standing for the facts and which must exist as experi- 
enced relations in the life process before they can be understood. 



Educational Implications 91 

The so-called crowded curriculum is responsible in some 
degree for the artificial requirements and consequent inferior 
interests of the school. It should be remembered that a pupil's 
experience is always unitary, developing from a tension in his 
present situation to the realization of an ideal situation, and 
that the amount of experience which can be given in a limited 
time is limited. The curriculum makes a logical classification 
of phases of experience as a product rather than as a process 
and is for the purpose of better defining for the teacher the 
various phases of experience, or studies, to be developed. The 
finer tensions, problems and consequent intrinsic interests of a 
study must grow out of the broader ones; and, when a greater 
number of differentiations are mapped out in the curriculum 
than the time devoted to them will permit to be normally 
developed in the experience of the pupil, the inner organic rela- 
tions are neglected and the contrast between these possible 
deeper relations and the superficial ones which take their place 
makes an overcrowded condition of the curriculum apparent. 
Superficial relations involve memorizing of the symbols of 
deeper ones without experiencing the full meaning symbolized; 
and, consequently, the inner organic connection with the source 
of intrinsic interest being neglected, the activity must be guided 
by interests extrinsic to the study. The ground is apparently 
covered; but, as in "cramming", those relations which constitute 
the valuable knowledge the curriculum intended are not realized 
in the life of the pupil. A fine sense of relative values, which 
is too often lacking, is here demanded both in the choice of the 
general curriculum and the great variety of often more im- 
portant choices which must be made by the teacher in teaching 
it. The crowded condition may be relieved in three ways : viz., 
by decreasing the number of subjects studied, by decreasing the 
attempted differentiations within each subject and by a closer 
correlation of studies. To decrease the number of subjects or 
differentiations, there must be some criterion of choice. The 
worth of a study is determined categorically by the ideal which 
it serves. Divisions of subject matter are not absolute, but 
mere aspects of a unitary experience and are determined teleo- 
logically in accordance with problems arising in the service of 
the more valuable ideals of life's activity. Not pedantic stand- 



92 The Learning Process 

ards belonging only to the school but the social ideals of what 
the pupil ought to do in life, limited, of course, by the pupil's 
instinctive tendencies and capabilities, are the ultimate guides 
for the teacher in determining the proper relative emphasis to be 
given among subjects or among differentiations within a sub- 
ject. Nothing should be taught to the child simply because it 
is valuable, but because it is more valuable for him than any- 
thing else which the experiencing of it will preclude. The fail- 
ure to sense a scale of relative values is the fundamental fault 
that permits an over-crowded curriculum. Furthermore, since 
the meaning of a thing is its relations, a lack of correlation brings 
poverty of meaning. One tension in a pupil's situation may 
involve the essential truths of several studies, one making the 
meaning of another clearer. Indeed, this is the natural way of 
development, for studies have developed out of a unitary ex- 
perience, and were not at first separate and afterwards to be 
united. That different subjects should be taught at different 
times and out of relation to others is a fiction that has grown 
from the logical classification of the curriculum and leads to 
waste both in time and energy. Complete thought is synthetic 
as well as analytic, so that logical classification is the separation 
of phases of experience only in the service of their recombina- 
tion in directing life's unitary activity; and, apart from their 
interrelations, the} 7 " lose their true significance as well as their 
deepest intrinsic interest. 

In the activity of the school generally, there is too little 
thinking of the nature demanded by the curriculum, another 
result of extrinsic interest. The constructive, synthetic aspect 
of thought, whereby facts are built into the living unity of the 
pupil's experience with such organic relations as make them 
truly significant, is conspicuously neglected. Too often are 
attempts made to work from the curriculum back to the ex- 
perience of the pupil rather than from the present experience of 
the pupil to the realization of the curriculum, as when generaliza- 
tions are given and then illustrated. This results in connecting 
the symbols of the curriculum with any extrinsic interests that 
happen to be active rather than finding first a genuine interest 
and developing it through the study. In preparing for recita- 
tions or examinations or for writing papers, pupils read or are 



Educational Implications 93 

given information by the teacher before having worked over 
their own experience so as to develop appreciations and prob- 
lems which would make the reading or lecture genuinely sig- 
nificant. The appreciation of ideals and the solution of prob- 
lems for which the pupil has not been prepared are thus under- 
taken, and mere memory of symbols, with sometimes only enough 
meaning to differentiate them, takes the place of that genuine ex- 
periencing which is essential to real knowledge. That knowledge 
which is power is the product of much thinking and this thinking 
must be done by the pupil himself. He must live the process in 
order to learn. Interference on the part of the teacher is justifi- 
able only when the pupil's activity takes a path of realization 
different from that intended by the curriculum and should be so 
directed as eventually to make such interference unnecessary. 
As knowledge is the product of the logical process, if proper 
habits of thinking are formed, the knowing will take care of 
itself. The teacher has done his perfect work when the pupil 
has acquired those norms of experience which enable him to 
continue his education during the remainder of his life, without 
purposive direction by others, when his self -activity on the 
basis of school experience, both concrete and formal, finds in the 
daily activities of life its own best realization. 



CHAPTER XI 

Summary 

The fundamental thought which it has been the purpose of 
this dissertation to emphasize is that learning is an essential 
phase of conscious living and can be neither understood nor con- 
trolled without involving the whole life process. This life 
process, in so far as it is conscious, is essentially activity con- 
tinuously directed to the realization of appreciated worths 
through the control of experience. In the consideration of 
historical typical theories of knowledge, an attempt has been 
made to show that the inadequacy of theories to solve the 
epistemological problem by revealing a criterion of truth or the 
educational problem by revealing the method whereby learning 
may be controlled, is due to abstracting from the conscious life 
process certain phases to the neglect of other phases which are 
data essential to the solution of the problem. The criterion of 
adequacy is consistency with all facts relating to the problem; 
and, since thought proceeds by the forming and testing of 
hypotheses, naturally the wider the view the more will conflicts 
annul untrue hypotheses and compel the thinker to devise others 
more satisfactory. 

The problem of knowledge arose when tribal traditions once 
naively followed were found to conflict. The consciousness of 
this conflict precipitated the sophistic age of skepticism, the 
precondition of a better founded faith. In this conflict of tribal 
habits interfering with harmonious activity, Socrates and Plato 
attempted to discover some principle of harmony which would 
determine the right form of active expression and turned from 
the realm of conflicting tradition to seek this principle of har- 
mony in the nature of the intellectual aspect of the self. Thus 
did they abstract the intellectual aspect of the self from active 
realization or the world of nature. Centering their attention 
upon the concepts, which mark an advanced stage in the know- 
ing process, they failed to indicate how these concepts developed 
out of active life with its emotional and volitional as well as 



Summary 95 

intellectual aspects. While they found a formal principle of 
harmony in the universal character of truth as common to all 
knowers, they, in common with other intellectualists, neglected 
the fact that life is essentially activity, and, in solving problems 
in the interest of this activity, thought finds its basis of existence : 
by limiting thought to itself, they would direct consciousness to 
its own destruction. Aristotle was interested in life as a whole, 
including both the knowing self and nature, and, except for the 
occasional influence of the abstract point of view of his illus- 
trious teachers, took a wider view-point, developing from it a 
doctrine with which much of modern theory is remarkably con- 
sistent. In the Middle Ages, during which time the church 
acting as authoritative dispenser of truth saved much of the 
ancient learning until a newer civilization could grow up to a 
comprehension of it, the problem of knowledge was not felt in a 
degree to cause much advance towards its solution. The re- 
ligious dogma, however, affected the further development of the 
problem by making an acute separation of body and soul, mind 
and matter. When conflicting doctrines grew up in the church 
and the further conflicting learning of the East spread over 
Europe, opposing traditions again precipitated an age of skepti- 
cism making the problem of knowledge once more vital, and 
Descartes, as did Socrates and Plato many centuries before, 
turned from the active realization of the self, or nature, to the 
concept, an abstraction from it, in an attempt to find some 
principle of harmony. The dualism which religious dogma had 
created between mind and matter limited him to one aspect of 
reality so as to make it impossible for him to discover the rela- 
tion between the general and particular of experience as phases 
of a unitary process. Accordingly, he abandoned what is most 
essential in the problem by concluding that the Divine Being 
mediates between mind and matter, a doctrina ignorantiae. Of 
the two terms of the dualism in one of which Descartes attempt- 
ed to find a principle of reconciliation, Locke abstracted one 
and Leibniz the other as bases of further attempts to solve the 
problem of knowledge. Locke, centering his attention upon 
the world of nature, the product of active realizing of the self, 
made knowledge a mechanical construct the method of which 
he could not explain without the assumption of mental self- 



96 The Learning Process 

activity and the intervention of God, the one foreign to his point 
of view and the other, as in the case of Descartes, a doctrina 
ignorantiae. Leibniz, centering his attention upon the mind, 
could connect what is known with the objects of knowledge only 
by the assumption of a harmony divinely preestablished, the 
method of which is beyond human ken. Kant, attempting to 
harmonize the opposed views represented by Locke and Leibniz, 
centered his attention upon the intellectual aspect of experience 
and analyzed knowledge as a product : by neglecting self -activity 
or will, he accounted for the development of knowledge in a 
rather mechanical way as the result of the interaction of object 
and subject, when object and subject do not exist prior to 
knowledge. Furthermore, psychology, in so far as the explana- 
tion of knowledge is attempted on the basis of psycho-physical 
parallelism, neglects the will and emotions as factors of it and 
views knowledge as a mechanical construct. In each of these 
theories, then, in so far as abstraction is made, neglecting the 
emotions and will, there results a mechanical theory of knowl- 
edge, or a doctrina ignorantiae, or a combination of the two. 
As the Greek school of thought found its completest expression 
in the writings of Aristotle, in which activity is recognized to be 
most fundamental to the problem, so modern thought, after 
unsuccessful efforts to satisfactorily solve the problem from an 
intellectualistic basis, has returned to a voluntaristic position. 
The monistic voluntaristic theory takes into consideration the 
whole active process of social realization. It accounts for the 
differentiation of the individual out of a social plasm in the 
vicarious guiding of his activity through valuable forms of 
experience. There differentiates out of his activity a conscious- 
ness of a present situation conditioned by his realization through 
past experience, an ideal situation viewed to be more satisfactory, 
and an activity exercising control of means, directed by a logical 
process, in the realizing of this ideal. In this individual active 
process alone are the phases of intellect, emotion and volition 
essentially related so as to reveal their true meanings, which are 
these very relations. Here learning is revealed to be a phase of 
the wider life process; in truth, to be the self-conscious direction 
of this process. The function of the school, accordingly, as a 
social institution is to reproduce in the lives of pupils those 



Summary 97 

typical situations that condition the most valuable experiences 
through which individuals in the race have lived. The funda- 
mental principle of the method of teaching is to reproduce the 
essential elements of these typical situations as they have been 
experienced independently of the school. As the work of 
education becomes more a rationalized endeavor, the school 
will less impose upon the pupil conditions peculiarly its own; 
for it realizes its true function and therefore finds salvation only 
when it loses itself in the service of a wider life and makes 
learning the repeating of the best types of self-conscious living. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Abbott: 
Adamson: 
Aristotle : 
Bagley: 
Baldwin: 



Balfour : 
Bosanquet: 
Bradley : 
Butler : 
Caird : 
Clifford: 
Darwin: 
Davidson: 
Veitch: 

Dewey: 



Dutton: 
Erdmann : 
Fischer : 
Fiske : 
Fitch: 
Froebel: 
Gomperz : 
Grant: 
Green: 
Grote : 
Hamilton : 
Hammond : 
Hanus : 
Harris: 
Hegel : 
Hobhouse : 
Hoffding: 
James : 
Janet : 
Kant: 
Kidd: 
Latta : 
Laurie : 
LeConte : 
Lotze : 
Locke : 
Mach: 



Kant's Theory of Ethics. 

Theory of Education in Plato's Republic. 

Analytics; Topics; Metaphysics; Nichomachean Ethics. 

Educative Process. 

Development and Evolution; Dictionary of Philosophy 
and Psychology; Mental Development; Social and 
Ethical Interpretations. 

Foundations of Belief. 

Logic; Psychology of the Moral Self. 

Appearance and Reality. 

Meaning of Education. 

Metaphysics (Ency. Brit.); Cartesianism (Ency. Brit.). 

Lectures and Essays. 

Descent of Man. 

History of Education ; Education of the Greek People. 

Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles 
of Descartes. 

Child and Curriculum; Educational Situation; Ethical 
Principles Underlying Education; Interest as Related 
to Will; Isolation of the School; Leibnitz's New Essays 
Concerning the Human Understanding; My Pedagogic 
Creed ; Psychology ; Psychological Aspects of the Curricu- 
lum ; Psychology and Social Practice ; School and Society ; 
Significance of the Problem of Knowledge; Studies in 
Logical Theory. 

Social Phases of Education. 

History of Philosophy. 

Descartes and his School. 

Destiny of Man. 

Lectures on Teaching. 

Education of Man. 

Greek Thinkers. 

Aristotle (Ency. Brit.). 

Prolegomena to Ethics. 

Aristotle; Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates. 

Lectures on Metaphysics. 

Aristotle, Psychology. 

Educational Aims and Educational Values. 

Psychologic Foundation of Education. 

Philosophy of Right. 

Theory of Knowledge; Mind in Evolution. 

Psychology. 

Principles of Psychology ; Will to Believe. 

History of the Problems of Philosophy. 

Critique of the Pure Reason. 

Social Evolution. 

Leibniz; The Monadology, etc. 

Institutes of Education. 

Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought. 

Microcosmus; Outlines of Psychology. 

Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. 

Analysis of Sensations. 



Bibliography 



P9 



Mackenzie: Introduction to Social Philosophy. 

McMurry: Method of the Recitation. 

Martineau: Types of Ethical Theory. 

McLellan and 

Dewey: Psychology of Number. 

Muirhead: Elements of Ethics. 

Miinsterberg: Grundzuge der Psychologie; Psychology and Life. 

Nettleship: Lectures on Plato's Republic; Theory of Education in 
Plato's Republic (Hellenica). 

Ormond: Foundations of Knowledge. 

Pater: Plato and Platonism. 

Paulsen: System of Ethics'; Introduction to Philosophy. 

Plato: Dialogues (Jowett's translation). 

Ritchie: Plato. 

Robertson: Elements of General Philosophy. 

Rosenkranz: Philosophy of Education. 

Royce: Conception of Immortality; Outlines of Psychology; Spirit 

of Modern Philosophy; World and the Individual. 

Russell: Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. 

Schiller : Humanism. 

Schwegler: History of Philosophy. 

Sidgwick: Methods of Ethics. 

Smith: Methods of Knowledge. 

Spencer: Principles of Ethics; Education. 

Stephen: Science of Ethics. 

Stout: Analytic Psychology. 

Strong: Why the Mind Has a Body. 

Thorndike: Educational Psychology; Elements of Psychology; Princi- 
ples of Teaching. 

Wallace: Aristotle; Psychology in Greek and English. 

Ward: Naturalism and Agnosticism. 

Watson: Christianity and Idealism; Kant; Outlines of Philosophy. 

Welton: Logical Bases of Education. 

Wenley: Socrates and Christ. 

Windelband: History of Philosophy. 

Wundt: Psychology. 

Xenophon : Memorabilia. 

Zeller: Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics; History of Greek 

Philosophy; Plato and the Older Academy; Stoics, 
Epicureans and Sceptics; Socrates and the Socratic 
Schools. 






VITA "*' 

Jesse Harliaman Coursault 

Born in Bellaire, Ohio, March 23, 1871. 

Attended the Douglass and Garfield elementary schools of 
Columbus, Ohio, and in 1889 was graduated from the Columbus 
Central High School. 

Entered the Ohio State University in 1889 and received from 
this institution the degrees A. B. in 1893 and A. M. in 1898. 

Graduate student in Harvard University during the year 1899- 
1900 and received from this institution the degree A. M. 

Special scholar in Teachers College, Columbia University, 
during the year 1 903-1 904, and fellow during 1 904-1 905. Re- 
ceived the Masters Diploma in 1904. 

Teacher in the Columbus Central High School during the 
years 1 894-1 899 and in the Columbus South High School during 
the years 1 900-1 903. 

Assistant Professor of the Philosophy of Education, Missouri 
State University, 1905 — 



THE LEARNING PROCESS 



Educational Theory Implied in Theory 01 

Knowledge 



Jesse H. Coursault 



Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements 
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 



1907 

i 



LB Mr '03 



